BRIDGER'S LAST STAND

by Linda Winstead Jones

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  Contents:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

  Epilogue

  * * *

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  ^ »

  Someone had punched up a disgustingly cheerful seventies tune, and Mal considered, just for a moment, taking his revolver from the holster on his belt and putting an end to the high-pitched voice that was wailing gleefully about an all-night party. He stared into his glass, at what was left of his Jack Daniel's and Coke, and stifled the urge. Good cops didn't shoot jukeboxes.

  From a booth in the far corner, a woman laughed loudly. Without turning to look, Mal knew it was the skinny redhead who'd arrived shortly after him to meet two other ladies for a girls' night out. Gigglers all, but the redhead had a particularly irritating laugh. She sounded remarkably like Wilma Flintstone.

  The bar was all but deserted on this miserable Tuesday night. That's why he was here, after all, instead of at a bar where he knew friends—other cops—would be. He didn't want to talk to anyone, didn't want to answer another question or endure another pat on the back. He'd been in this place a few times, so he'd come here. It was usually packed on the weekends, but on weeknights after ten o'clock it was quiet, a good place to be alone.

  Usually the weeknight patrons left the damned jukebox alone. The three giggling women in the corner, however, had been feeding quarters into it as if it were a slot machine.

  At least the bar wasn't crowded. Besides the three women, there was a couple seated at one of the round tables in the middle of the room, and an old man who was a regular at Rick's Retro Bar 'n' Grill. And him.

  He tensed as the door opened. Because this wasn't his usual hangout, where all the other cops went to unwind, he was alone and there was no one to watch his back. He might be off duty, but that didn't make him stupid. He was always aware of who was around, especially after a day like today. His nerves were raw, jumpy, and the Jack Daniel's hadn't even begun to settle them down. If this was a newspaper reporter, or another blasted airhead television "investigator," he was likely to lose it, here and now. He relaxed, though, when a lone woman came in, her eyes on the bartender and not on him. He watched with his peripheral vision as she slid onto a bar stool, leaving two empty stools between them.

  "I'll give you five bucks to unplug that infernal machine," she said grumpily, waving a crumpled five-dollar bill at pretty boy Benny, who gave her a brilliant smile and shook his head.

  Mal watched the woman, without appearing to, as she ordered her drink, a strawberry daiquiri, and slipped out of a dark all-weather coat that was still sparkling with raindrops. Her hair was wet, not soaked through but damp with dewlike moisture. It was raining. He wasn't surprised. It was a fitting end to a lousy day. He looked away as the woman tossed her coat over an empty barstool.

  She didn't say anything else but placed her elbows on the bar and leaned forward, waiting patiently while Benny fixed her drink. The bartender was, as usual, efficient. She didn't have long to wait.

  "Well." Behind the safety of the bar, Benny grinned brightly and planted himself between Mal and the woman. His face was tanned, his teeth were white, and his dark hair was moussed into a stupor. Though born and raised in Decatur, Alabama, he managed to talk without a trace of a Southern accent. It was damned unnatural. "I don't think I've ever seen two more miserable people in all my years as a bartender."

  All his years? The kid was no more than twenty-five. Mal was not impressed.

  The newest patron was concentrating on her frothy, fruity drink, leaning forward slightly so that her light blue sweater fell away from her body, giving Mal a glimpse of pale shoulder to the beginning swell of her breasts. There was only a small amount of skin exposed, but it was a powerfully tempting sight. Too tempting to linger on. A navy blue skirt came just to her knees, barely covering nice, long legs. His eyes really shouldn't have lingered there, either, but they had. She sipped her frozen drink through a straw but paused long enough to respond to Benny's comment.

  "I've had a really bad day."

  "Me, too," Mal mumbled.

  The woman shot him a furtive glance between sips, her bright blue eyes set in a classically pretty face drilling right through him. Looking at him and into him. The effect was immediate and powerful and unexpected. At another time, in another place, on a better day, a man could get lost in eyes like those.

  She had the look of the girl-next-door—wholesome and healthy, a bright, clean-cut, all-American girl who was much too pretty to be sitting all alone in a bar on a Tuesday night. Surely she was waiting for someone, some lucky man whose day hadn't turned to crap before eight in the morning.

  His wandering eyes lit on a damp strand of blond hair that brushed her cheek. Soft, barely curling hair, it was cut too short and in one of those ragged styles that was trendy and definitely beyond him.

  When women found out he was a cop, their reactions almost always fell into one of two categories. They were abnormally fascinated or they were repulsed. He didn't care for either response, but he was used to them. Usually he could look at a woman and know which category she'd fall into, but he couldn't tell about this one.

  "Really bad," he added, as if he had to defend himself. She stared into her rapidly disappearing rose-colored drink. "I was fired," she said as she attacked the straw again.

  Fired. That was nothing. People were fired every day.

  She played with her strawberry daiquiri, swirling the straw through the frozen mix, lifting icy clumps on the end of the straw and watching them plop back into the glass. Finally she released the straw and swiveled to face him. "If I couldn't do my job I would understand, but to be fired because the boss's new fiancée needs a job, well, that hurts. He said I was late one time too many, but I don't buy it. I always make up my time when I come in late."

  Mal answered with a noncommittal hum.

  "My car's making a funny noise," she added.

  He wouldn't touch that one with a ten-foot pole. Once you got involved with a woman's automotive troubles you were in too deep. He wasn't going to say a word. Hell, he didn't want to know, and he surely didn't need to know. "What kind of funny noise?" he asked, the male instinct within him unable to resist.

  She made a harsh gurgling noise that made no sense, mechanically speaking, and Mal just shook his head.

  "I got home," she continued, "to find five messages on my machine. All from my mother. She wants her only daughter—that would be me—to get married. She wants grandchildren before she's too old to bounce a baby on her frail old knee." Her sweet voice was laced with sarcasm. "I get this every time one of her friends has another grandchild," she said, before grasping the straw with restless fingers.

  "She still doesn't understand why I broke up with my last boyfriend. Even though it's been over a year, she somehow thinks it's all a cruel joke Reese and I perpetuate just to distress her." She looked at him, a sidelong and somewhat suspicious glance, as if she were wondering whether she could trust him with her deepest secrets. "Reese, the guy I dated for almost two years and was engaged to for six months, and the boss who fired me today. That toad," she muttered under her breath.

  Mal shook his head knowingly. "Messy."

  She nodded in agreement and sucked down a good portion of her daiquiri. "And then," she said as she took her mouth from the straw, "some demon within suggested that I get a new haircut to cheer myself up." With both hands she framed her shaggy hair. "And I get this. Brutal, don't you think?"

  "It looks nice," Mal said evenly, even though it was pretty bad. It was hard to tell exactly how bad, since she'd been out in the rain, but that didn't make any difference. He was old enough and savvy enough to know there were some question
s a man never answered truthfully. Does this dress make me look fat? Am I getting old? Isn't this a horrid haircut?

  She leaned toward him, and the wide neck of her lightweight sweater shifted again, just a little, to expose a generous portion of the gentle curve of her shoulder. His mouth went dry. Ah, God, he didn't need this now. On the other hand, maybe this was exactly what he needed. He stilled the urge to reach out and lay his fingers on that warm, soft-looking skin.

  "Nice?" she asked incredulously, running her fingers through the short, jagged strands. "It looks like she used a weed-whacker instead of scissors."

  He laughed. A few minutes ago he'd thought it impossible to ever laugh again, and now here he was…

  "So," she said as she resumed the position above her drink. "What about you?"

  Mal shook his head.

  "Come on," she crooned. "I shared."

  Mal grimaced. "I don't share. Ever."

  She sighed and drew away from him, distancing herself physically and mentally. "Sorry," she mumbled. "Now don't I feel like a complete fool. I unburden myself to a perfect stranger—"

  "Detective Bridger's not perfect," Benny interrupted.

  Hell, he had that right.

  Mal hesitated before looking up. She knew he was a cop, now. And he'd look into those big blue eyes and know what she felt, whether she was fascinated or disgusted. He didn't really want to see either.

  But Benny moved down the bar, and Mal swung his stool around so he was facing this woman who'd had such a bad day. "I shot a man," he said softly. The truth, all of the ugly truth out in the open for the world to see. Funny, but he didn't see the too-bright light of obsession in her eyes, or the sudden distance of loathing. So he went on. "Jeff Thrasher, who already had an impressive record of burglaries and drug possession, tried to rob a convenience store. There were people in the store—a woman and her little boy on their way to school, a young girl picking up a quart of milk, and a cop on his way to work, gassing up and grabbing that first cup of coffee." And a Twinkie, though he wouldn't mention it. Sounded too much like the proverbial doughnut.

  "I take it you're the cop in question?"

  Mal nodded. What, the woman didn't watch television or listen to the radio? It had been all over the news. Every time he'd turned his car radio on or caught a glimpse of TV, the story had been there. He was sick of it, tired of hearing the details again and again.

  But for some reason he didn't mind telling it now. For her. "Thrasher was unhappy to find that there was only twenty-four bucks in the cash register. Very unhappy. He grabbed the clerk across the counter and started waving a gun in his face. The woman screamed, and he spun around and fired a shot that barely missed her." Mal had known when he saw those eyes that Thrasher would kill everybody in that store without a second thought.

  "You killed him?"

  "I killed him." It was the first time he'd said the words aloud, and they came with a catch in his heart he couldn't ignore. A thousand times in this long, hellish day, he'd relived the moment when he'd pulled the trigger. A bullet to the chest and one to the head, a textbook shooting. If he hadn't stopped Thrasher when he had, someone else would be dead. The woman or her little boy, the clerk or the girl who'd dropped her milk when the shooter had spun around. Maybe all of them.

  He'd seen a lot in his years on the force, but he'd never had to kill anyone before today.

  "Oh." She nodded as if she understood perfectly. "You win," she said as she lifted her half-empty glass in salute. Bless her, he didn't see anything in her eyes but sympathy. There was no pity there, no revulsion, none of the sick thrill of someone else's tragedy.

  "What's the prize?" As soon as the flippant question was out of his mouth, he regretted it. She was an attractive woman, they were both drowning their sorrows; she was bound to take it the wrong way.

  She didn't. She waved an elegant hand to Benny, indicating that this round was on her.

  Mal scooted over one stool. So did she. His knee brushed against hers, and they both adjusted themselves quickly. "Frannie Vaughn," she said when she was comfortably seated on her new perch, and she offered her hand as any man would do.

  "Malcolm Bridger." He touched her, slid his fingers over her palm and wrapped them around her hand. Her fingers were delicate, her skin warm. "But everybody calls me Mal." It felt so good to hold her hand, so satisfying, that he was reluctant to let it go. He had to, though. As his fingers slipped past hers the jukebox started up again.

  "I thought disco was dead," Frannie said with a forlorn sigh.

  * * *

  It was a little late for second thoughts, but Frannie knew she really shouldn't drink at all. She'd never been able to handle more than a single glass of wine.

  She did feel better now than she had when she'd come in, but she had a sneaking suspicion that the daiquiris had nothing to do with her improved mood. What was it about shared misery that could make even the worst day of her life seem tolerable?

  So she had no job, no man in her life, no prospects for either. Decisions, important decisions, would have to be made, and soon. She had a mortgage to think of, and there was insurance, food, the last few car payments. Right now none of that mattered. She and Bridger had dismissed their problems, for a while, to come up with a few inventive and destructive ways to disable the jukebox.

  She would have pegged him for a cop even if Benny hadn't called him "Detective Bridger," even if she hadn't spotted the weapon that peeked out from under his suit jacket when he moved just so, the badge that was hooked to his belt close to the gun. Cops held themselves differently, taller, cockier, even when sitting on a barstool. Add to that posture the no-nonsense haircut, the rock-hard jaw, the wary eyes that were never still, and you had a cop for sure.

  The mere presence of the gun had scared her at first. God, she hated them! But after a while she'd managed to almost forget it was there. Bridger wasn't the type of man who would abuse the power a weapon gave him.

  In spite of the fact that he'd had a day even worse than hers, in spite of the fact that he wore a gun so casually at his waist, there was a comforting air about Bridger, and somehow she was encompassed by it. That air was masculine and sheltering, so sheltering she knew nothing bad would touch her tonight.

  The ladies in the corner booth left, talking about how in a few hours they'd have to get up to see kids off to school and husbands off to work. How mundane, how boring.

  How wonderful.

  The jukebox was still playing as they left. Just her luck. They'd fed so many quarters into the machine it might very well play all night. But as she was silently cursing the return of music from the seventies and eighties, a new song came up on the jukebox. This was one she could live with. "Loverboy," she whispered.

  "What?" Bridger leaned in close.

  She glanced at him and smiled. "On the jukebox." "This Could Be The Night" played softly. "Do you dance, Detective Bridger?"

  He shook his head slowly. "Never."

  Frannie slid from the bar stool, taking Bridger's hand as her feet hit the floor. "Never say never."

  He followed her, hand in hand, to the small dance floor. His arm slipped around her waist and he eased her against him as they fell into an easy and graceful motion, as if they'd danced to this song a thousand times. It was nice, she thought. She liked the feel of his hard, warm fingers wrapped so carefully around her own, liked the feel of the strong arm around her. Heavens, the man smelled good. Not artificially sweet or tangy, like a cologne or aftershave might, but real. Malcolm Bridger smelled like a man, of warmth and musk and salty sweat. Under her hand, the muscles of his shoulder flexed as he moved, and she was so distracted by the sensation that she almost forgot to move with him.

  They swayed easily, rhythmically and without conscious thought, and Frannie placed her head on Bridger's shoulder. His thighs slid against hers. "I love this song," she whispered. "When I was a kid I practically wore my cassette player out playing Loverboy over and over."

  "Considering w
hat we've been listening to all night, it's an improvement," he muttered, his mouth close to her ear.

  She felt good here, sheltered from the rain and the reality outside these walls. It was Bridger more than the old familiar song, she realized, companionship rather than the daiquiris. Had she come to Rick's with the intention of hiding?

  "I've never seen you here before," Bridger said softly.

  Maybe the silence and the easy dance were too much for him, and he had to break the mood somehow. She understood. Heaven help her, it was quickly proving too much for her. She didn't want this song, or this night, to end.

  "I'm usually in here for lunch a couple times a week. Benny makes a mean salad and a wicked cup of coffee." With every move, every gentle sway, she was somehow closer to Bridger. Heavens, too close. She lifted her head to look at him and backed up so there was a little more distance between her body and his. "The office is just a few blocks up the street."

  The office. Just like that her troubles came rushing back. For more than three years she'd been a key player at Haywood's Southern Candies. She wrote software to accommodate the mail-order business, and she'd recently been working on an on-line catalog. Since it was a small company, she also answered phones on occasion, and played troubleshooter with clients as well as with her computers. Reese had no right to fire her. It wasn't fair, what was she going to do now?

  Bridger swayed close, just a little bit too close, so that his scent teased her nostrils again. So Reese wasn't fair, right now it didn't matter.

  The music came to an end, and they stopped moving. Bridger didn't let her go right away, but held her hand and kept a steadying arm around her. "Maybe we shouldn't blow up the jukebox after all," he whispered.

  Another selection soon took the place of the slow love song, and the spell was broken. Harsh sounds filled the bar, and Frannie jerked her head around to look at the jukebox. "That's it," she said, forgetting Reese and her lost job.

  Bridger's arms fell away. "What?" He faced the jukebox with her, his entire body alert as he faced an unseen threat.