Searching for Love

by Christine Zolendz

  I sat, warming up my own car, chasing away the millions of images of Brooke in my head. I wanted desperately to ask her out on a real date, but there was no way I could, not when she was crying over some mysterious guy who kept sending her flowers. She needed to have her head cleared. I wasn’t a good fit for rebounds. Not when I liked her as much as I already did.

  There was a sudden knock on the passenger’s side window, and Dean Fury’s face pressed up against the glass. Laughing, I opened the window to talk to him. “What up?” I asked, pulling a pack of gum from my pocket.

  “Why did I just see you walking my little sister to her car and standing over her like you wanted to kiss her?” he demanded, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Because I walked her to her car, and I wanted to kiss her,” I said, unwrapping a stick of gum and popping it into my mouth.

  “Cage, stay away from Brooke, okay?”

  “Last time I checked, she was an adult, right?” I said, snapping a bubble to end the thought.

  “I swear to God—” he started.

  “What, Dean? What?” I asked, waving my hands at him.

  “I don’t want you touching her. She’s a good kid.”

  “Dean, she’s not a kid,” I said, scowling. The thought was pedophilic and beyond creepy.

  He opened the door and gave me a threatening look that made me laugh. “I’m watching you, Cage.” What the hell did that even mean? I started the car and revved the engine.

  “Yeah. That’s scary. Hey Fury, you know who you should be watching? Whoever it is that’s sending her all those flowers and making her cry at work. Not the guy who took her to dinner to make sure she was okay. Asshole.”

  I drove away without even waiting for him to shut the door. I pulled out so damn fast it slammed shut all on its own.

  Chapter 5

  Brooke

  Whenever I have a Sunday off that matches with my brother, we have a family dinner at my parents’ house. It’s loud and crazy, filled with yelling and laughter, and I absolutely love it.

  My dad was at the kitchen table cleaning firearms with Dean and me, while my mother was bending over, watching an enormous pan of eggplant parmesan bubble to perfection in the oven. Liv stood at the counter, laughing and chopping a bunch of vegetables to throw together in a salad. The smell of basil and sweet oregano filled the house, and I knew somewhere beneath it was the hint of a freshly baked pie that someone made earlier that morning.

  “How’s the case going with the cadets?” My father’s voice was low and grumbly, and I knew it was for my sake. We’d been together cooking and cleaning for about an hour, and he couldn’t hold the question off any longer. He knew it broke my heart to talk about the two young cadets that were gunned down over a month ago. They were from my command, kids I worked with, was close to, and we still had no leads.

  Dean spoke softly to him as I set my gun down. I had just finished oiling it and was letting it sit for a moment. Dean glanced quickly in my direction, but I pretended not to notice and went to the sink to wash my hands.

  “I hate the smell of that cleaner,” Liv said, slipping up to the counter next to me. She elbowed me in the side, and her eyebrows pulled together. “Are you okay?” she mouthed to me.

  I nodded and gave her a big smile.

  She narrowed her eyes at me and pursed her lips.

  The woman had been my best friend since kindergarten. There was never any use lying to her, but I couldn’t find the strength to actually talk to her about what was going on with me. I couldn’t put the feelings into words yet, not without crying. And I was so tired of crying.

  “You are a big, fat liar,” she whispered.

  I looked at my ass theatrically and widened my eyes. “Did you just call me fat?”

  She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Hey, you know that math teacher I introduced you to last weekend?” she asked, placing the knife she was using into the sink to rinse it off.

  “Um,” I had to think for a moment, “Charles?”

  “Yeah, Charlie Denison. He uh, asked about you the other day,” she said with a mischievous smile and wagging eyebrows.

  Just no.

  Ew.

  “Oh, did he?” I said, feigning the least bit of interest I could muster. I didn’t even think Charles Denison could grow his own facial hair, and he was awkwardly skinnier than me. He also asked if I had a Tinder profile to have a “one-off” with me. Those were, unfortunately, his exact words.

  “Yeah, he asked if you were single,” she said. Her voice sounded way too excited about this conversation. She was even bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  “Oh, who is this now?” my mother asked, cutting in between us and shoving a dish that was obviously not dirty into the sink. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to listen, I was…just…this dish needed a little cleaning.”

  Liv smiled at my mother’s intrusion and plopped her arm over her shoulder, hugging her tightly. “I was just telling Brooke that one of the teachers from my school was asking about her.”

  “Tell him I’m not interested,” I blurted, horrifying myself with the dryness of my own words.

  “Not interested in what? A man? Having an adult relationship? Marriage? Love? Children?” Here we go. My mother was on a roll now. “We just want to see you happy.”

  Liv pulled her lips between her teeth and tried not to laugh.

  “Liv, really?” I widened my eyes at her. “What was he, like twenty-one? And he’s got a Tinder obsession that I don’t really care for.”

  “So he’s a little younger than you, so what? Younger men are fun!” My mother whisper-yelled. She looked back at my father and Dean who were doing their best to ignore our conversation. “When was the last time you went out on a date? And what’s a Tinder?”

  “Like two weeks ago, okay?” I stammered. “And don’t ever mention Tinder again, okay? Wipe the word from your vocabulary. Please.”

  “How will you meet someone if every time someone tries to set you up, you make up excuses to not go out with him?” my mother hissed at me.

  It wasn’t finding a date that was hard. It was getting them to want more than a one-night stand or a three-month-long hook-up. I looked to Liv for a little support. “Seriously, I’ll take a pass on Mr. Math. There was definitely no chemistry there.” I looked in my mother’s eyes and offered her a sweet smile, “I’ll find a nice guy, I promise.”

  I was a horrible liar, and I was pretty positive I would die an old maid with a dozen candy-named cats with bells attached to their collars.

  I came from a big, loving family. We always had friends or family over, cousins and aunts and uncles, and I still wanted that, so badly. I even begged my best friend to stay with me when she needed help, and she ended up with my brother falling head over heels in love with her.

  I found myself asking, When in the hell was it going to be my turn? I wanted a marriage and kids. What’s wrong with me? And I really honestly thought Harris and I were…something. What the hell was wrong with my intuition?

  “You young kinds have way too many boyfriends,” my father grumbled from behind us. “You go out with different people all the time. Stick with one, and then you settle down and get married.” He narrowed his eyes at my mother and gave her a naughty smile. “Tinder is what you use to get a quick lay these days.”

  “Okay, thanks everyone. I’ll take all of your relationship critiques into consideration,” I laughed, looking up toward the ceiling for some divine intervention. I’d even settle for a lightning bolt if my father ever repeated the words “quick lay” again. Then, Ryan’s face crashed into my mind. “Oh, hey Liv, I gave a friend of mine your number in case he needs it. He’s actually the new guy on Dean’s team. Remember him? Ryan Cage?”

  “Yeah, of course. I remember him. We’ve been out with him a few times.” Her expression twisted in confusion. “But why would you give him my number?”

  “His brother is autistic and is staying with him for a month. I told him if he had an
y questions he could call one of us.”

  “Cage? Cage has an autistic brother?” Dean asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, that’s what he said at dinner yesterday.”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me.

  “Dinner yesterday?” Liv repeated, her eyebrows arching dangerously close to her hairline. My mother stood next to her, smiling stupidly.

  “Yeah, what was that about?” Dean asked, stepping closer to me. “I don’t like the idea of you and Cage doing anything together.”

  “Cage is an ass,” I said, trying to get them off my back. Or at least stop them all from looking at me like they were.

  “Oh, okay.” Dean looked pretty satisfied. “He is. I agree.”

  “A sexy as fuck ass,” I said, biting my lip.

  “He totally is. I agree,” Liv said, trying not to burst out laughing.

  “Did you meet him on Tinder?” my father asked.

  “Okay, enough!” my mother called out, choking back a giggle. “Dinner’s ready. Let’s go. Everybody at the table. Guns away.”

  Liv barked out a giggle, “You would only ever hear a sentence like that in the Fury household.”

  “Hey, how’s your mother, Liv?” I asked grabbing the salad bowl and walking it into the dining room. “Doesn’t she get to make phone calls this month?”

  “Yes!” Liv beamed, moving the napkins onto the table excitedly. “She sounds great. I can’t believe it. She’s been sober for five weeks now. Can you imagine?”

  It was hard to picture. Liv’s mother lived next door to us for twenty years, and I had never, not even once in all that time, seen her sober. But, if it weren’t for her drunk butt dial in the middle of the night, Liv and Dean wouldn’t have ever gotten together. “She’s taking one day at a time in rehab, but God she sounds like a different person. A happier one.”

  “And,” she said, grabbing onto my arm, “I’ve been talking with my stepmother!” My mouth dropped completely open. I was so happy for her. A few weeks ago, she didn’t even know she had a stepmother or a whole other family. “We’re planning on meeting soon. Dean’s going to fly us out there the next vacation we get.”

  I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed, “That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.”

  My mother scooped out the food onto everyone’s plate, and there was nothing, but complete and utter silence as we ate her delicious dinner. “S’good,” I mumbled.

  “So, Brooke. Enough talk about you getting laid. What’s going on in the neighborhood?” my father grunted, between bites of salad.

  I shook my head and chuckled. “There was a break in at the dentist’s office. Some idiot broke in, and get this, stole nothing. No meds or prescription pads, nothing. Just destroyed the place and spray-painted the word, ‘whore,’ about a thousand times all over the walls and doors.”

  Across from me Dean stilled, “What?”

  “Yeah, nothing was stolen,” I repeated, and took another forkful of eggplant. A long string of mozzarella snapped up and splattered over my cheek.

  Dean pushed his chair back and shot up. “When was this? Where? Does the office have video surveillance? Anything?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to wipe the cheese off my face, but failing epically.

  “That’s what was written on the walls where the cadets were killed,” Dean said low.

  “What? You never…no one ever told me that,” my words tripped over one another.

  “We’re still investigating the homicide. We haven’t let out all the information. You know that. There’s absolutely no leads. Not until now.”

  “You think they’re tied together?” I asked, heart pounding in my chest.

  “I don’t know.” Dean looked at our father—a retired detective who served for over twenty-five years—and nodded to him. “A burglary at a dentist’s office where nothing was stolen. And an execution style murder of two seventeen-year old kids? The commonality is in both places the word, ‘whore,’ was written all over the walls.”

  “Which dentist? You’re not talking about Dr. Morton, are you? Gavin?” My mother asked, clutching her hands to her chest.

  “Yeah,” I nodded gravely, hoping she wouldn’t ask any other questions. “I took the call myself with Gunner.”

  My mother’s eyes widened. “I tried to set the two of you up last month, didn’t I? I got his personal number after my cleaning. He liked the picture I had of you on my phone.”

  Shit. She remembered. “Yeah, we went out for…ice cream.”

  Dad and Dean gave each other a strange narrow-eyed look.

  “What? What was that look for?” I stammered.

  “It’s a far reach that it has anything to do with you, but you were close to the cadets, and you dated the dentist.”

  “I went for ice cream with him. I wasn’t dating him.”

  “Ryan said something to me after I watched him walk you to your car,” Dean said quickly, ignoring anything I was saying.

  “You watched him walk me to my car?” I said, voice rising.

  “Does anyone find it strange a dentist would take someone on a date to an ice cream parlor?” Liv asked.

  Ignoring Liv, Dean continued, “He said I should be worried about who was sending you flowers and making you cry. He was trying to make sure you were okay. Do you have some sort of a stalker? Who are you dating?”

  “No one,” I said with a relieved laugh. “And I can take care of myself. No one needs to make sure I’m okay, because I’m okay. The flowers were from someone completely not related to any of this, okay? That’s a dead end. It has nothing to do with it. It’s just a guy I was dating who wants another chance.” I darted my eyes to Liv, who looked at me questioningly.

  “Someone’s sending you flowers? At work?” My mother cooed. “That’s a grand gesture. Maybe you should give whomever it is another chance?”

  “Yeah, sure Mom, maybe.”

  How I wished I could tell everyone, but I couldn’t. I was too ashamed, and too damn scared of what would happen if everyone knew.

  Chapter 6

  Ryan

  My job pretty much sucked.

  A job like mine takes a toll on you…on your soul.

  It makes you stop feeling human. You always feel empty. You’re not comfortable in groups of people, normal gatherings, you just end up looking around and thinking, None of these people have a clue. And you end up feeling completely and utterly alone.

  Cops are willing to do the things you think are beneath you. See the things that you don’t want to see. Run into the places that you’d never go. We’re the ones who hold hands with the dying as they struggle to keep breathing, clawing onto the life that quickly spills out of them. We’re the ones who have to try to protect the innocent, even when they are fighting us and spitting in our face. We see violence, and we have to pull it apart, piece by piece, and try to solve the puzzle of why it came to be—how to stop it—all while being trained to be the most violent part of it.

  You work side-by-side with the worst part of humanity. Every single day.

  Not many people have the fortitude to deal with it.

  Like this morning before breakfast, I met with the mutilated body of one Rosemary Morales. The fifty-seven-year-old was splayed on the floor of her roach-infested apartment, her blood sprayed across the walls and ceiling. She sold drugs for a living, and when that didn’t pay enough, she sold herself. Her killer could be anyone. But I knew within weeks, my team and I would handle it. We’d gather all the evidence, investigate, interview, and ultimately arrest the person who did it. The truth was she probably owed someone money or sold them some bad shit.

  We were great detectives.

  I skipped eating breakfast, and I figured I’d just binge on lunch, but that’s when we got a call that an eight-year-old kid stumbled upon his parents’ corpses when he was trying to get himself ready for school. Both bodies sat stiff on a couch, heads bowed down in that familiar drugged induced nod, needles st
ill stuck in both of their veins. We called in the proper agencies and made sure the kid ended up in the safest place possible. Always fixing the problems we could. The problem being that humanity was pretty much gone from these forgotten pockets of the world.

  The late afternoon was full of watching surveillance tapes and trying to find people to question.

  Easy day to handle, really. I was used to the grit of the job. I was used to seeing monsters prey on victims, victims becoming monsters. I was used to fixing the thing that lost its humanity by handing out justice when needed.

  What I couldn’t put a handle on was when I was not able to make anything better.

  And that evening, for Cameron, that was something I was not able to do for him. The simple act of making him feel better.

  I couldn’t help him.

  Autism wasn’t something I could arrest. It wasn’t a physical entity I could slap a pair of cuffs on and punish for committing a crime. It was something he was living with, and it was invisible and uncontrollable to me.

  I couldn’t help him at all.

  And he reacted like his world was ending.

  I saw it, plain as day, the minute it happened. The exact second that everything became too much for Cameron, and he just imploded. All my tactical training, range time, criminal justice degrees—I had nothing to use to help him.

  It started with a low rumbling. A few murmuring tones under his breath. Then, he was pacing up and down, becoming more and more aggressive with everything.

  All I did was try and cook him dinner.

  Then, everything flew outward. Words. Screams. Fists. Objects. He was punching himself in the head, over and over. Mumbling words and curses. Slapping, palms open, just slapping at his head. Bouncing up and down on his toes, covering his face and wailing into his hands.

  All I did was put a plate of spaghetti in front of him.

  He roared and pulled out a drawer, throwing it across the room. With one giant swipe of his arm, things flew off the table, dishes crashed against the walls. The spaghetti hit the ceiling and stuck.