Without Restraint

by Angela Knight

  Stopping the car, Alex hit the button to roll down the windows and listened. Crickets, frogs, canned television laughter from one of the neighboring trailers, but no yelling or screams. Which meant either that Donny was just having a beer before bed, or he wasn’t yet drunk enough to start using his fists on his wife. That might change as the night wore on, but there wasn’t anything she could do until and unless he got pissy.

  Alex drove slowly away, making a mental note to keep an eye on 30A as the night wore on.

  She stopped off at the Gas-N-Go, ostensibly to grab a coffee, but mostly to check on the third-shift clerk, a comfortably plump black woman named Betty who had survived three convenience store robberies. Alex liked to swing by periodically in hopes of discouraging anybody else who might want to target the fifty-year-old.

  She paid for her coffee while Betty recounted the latest adventures of the grandson she was raising. He’d made the honor roll, thanks mostly to his grandmother’s relentless badgering.

  “Don’t want the boy to end his days workin’ somewhere like this,” Betty said, handing Alex her change. “I want him to go to college and make something of himself.”

  “He’s a good kid,” Alex assured her, taking a sip of her coffee, “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

  Leaving the store, she headed off on the next leg of the patrol, cruising through another couple of neighborhoods, then checking the rear doors at a local strip mall to make sure none of the shops had been burglarized.

  It was then she realized she’d been unconsciously listening for Ted’s voice on the radio. Her eyes began to sting as she turned into Happy Valley again.

  Alex was headed past 30A when she heard the screaming. With a soft curse, she braked, threw the car into park, and radioed dispatch for backup. Judging from the drunken curses, she was going to need a hand with Donny Royce.

  “No, Donny!” Polly shrieked over the screams of her three young children.

  “Fuck.” From the sound of it, she couldn’t wait for Bruce and Frank to arrive. Flinging the door open, Alex drew her gun and hauled ass for the wooden steps. They rang under her boots as she took them two at a time. “Police!” She hammered a fist on the door hard enough to make it rattle on its hinges. “Open the door, Donny!”

  “Get lost, bitch!” Royce roared back. “This ain’t none of your business!”

  “Help!” a childish voice screamed. “Help my momma! Daddy’s hurtin—” A sharp slap, and the girl broke off with a yelp.

  Alex tried the door. Dammit, locked. She hated breaking down doors. Using your own leg as a battering ram was never a good idea. Rearing back, she slammed her foot into the wood beside the door handle. It was a cheap lock, but it was harder to kick down a door than cop shows would have you believe. It took her four more kicks to get the door open, accompanied by a rising chorus of screams, curses, and threats from inside the trailer.

  At last the door burst wide and Alex ducked inside. She was vaguely conscious of sirens wailing closer, but she was more interested in keeping Donny from beating his relatives to death. None of whom was in sight.

  “You keep your fuckin’ mouth shut, Polly!” a slurred male voice roared from somewhere farther back in the trailer. Probably a bedroom.

  “Police! Mr. Royce, get away from your wife!” Glock pointed at the ceiling, Alex strode through the trailer, past a sagging couch and duct-taped vinyl recliner, stepping over dolls and plastic dinosaurs, Legos grinding underfoot. Her instinct was to run, but that was an invitation to a bullet, and she wasn’t in the mood to get shot.

  Particularly after what happened to Ted.

  Good thing Donny had been too busy beating Polly to blast her while she was kicking in the door. She’d known she was taking a risk while she’d done it, but she hadn’t had much choice. Not with the children screaming.

  As she’d thought, they were in the back bedroom. Alex found Royce kneeling astride his wife, who was curled in a fetal ball, trying to protect her head with both arms as the big bruiser plowed his fists into any part of her he could reach. A wiry ten-year-old boy hauled fruitlessly on his arm, trying to get him off. The couple’s two girls, four and six, huddled crying in the corner. To Alex’s fury, one of them cradled a badly bruised face as she sobbed.

  Cursing mentally, Alex holstered her gun. No matter how much the son of a bitch deserved a bullet, she couldn’t shoot him. She might hit his wife or one of the kids. She could Taser him, but again, there was too much chance of hitting somebody else. She was going to have to do this the really hard way, which meant she was probably going to get a punch in the teeth. Or two. Or four.

  In the words of Ted Arlington, “So you get punched. You’re a cop. It’s the job.”

  Alex grabbed her handcuffs from their belt pouch, jumped on the bed, and snapped at the boy, “Get out of the way!”

  The child had seen her coming and was already tumbling clear. She clicked one bracelet of the cuffs on the arm Donny had drawn back to hit his wife.

  But before she could apply torque to the captured wrist, he whipped around, snarling at her through the tangled growth of his graying beard, his eyes beady and black with rage. “Bitch! I told you to stay out of this!” His fist slammed into her head before she could block, and she saw stars as she fell on her back, half off the mattress. The taste of blood filled her mouth as she fought to shake off the impact. The bastard could hit like the bull he resembled.

  “Where’s your little blond fruit friend?” Royce landed astride her and slammed his fist into her jaw. Her teeth cracked together, pain radiating through her skull. “Oh, that’s right—he got his brains blown out, didn’t he? Couldn’t have happened to a nicer homo. Where did either of you hypocrites get off charging me with shit, after the way he beat on that black boyfriend of his?”

  A wave of fury made the pain recede. “You shut your foul, bigoted mouth!” Alex drove a fist into the balls his kneeling position had placed in easy reach. He howled and tumbled off the bed, gagging and clutching himself. She leaped on him, teeth bared, the need for revenge filling her mouth, mixing with the copper taste of her own blood.

  Hitting him felt damned good.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Frank skidded to a halt behind Alex’s patrol car, blue lights sweeping over the scene to the banshee wail of the siren. Shrill screams and male bellows rang through the double-wide’s thin walls, along with what sounded like Alex’s voice shouting orders. Some of his tension eased. If she was yelling, she was okay. Probably.

  Another Crown Vic pulled up behind him in a rattling spray of gravel. He wasn’t surprised to see Bruce Greer get out of the unit. They exchanged tense glances, and Greer fell in behind Frank as he charged up the wooden stairs with his weapon drawn.

  The door was standing open, its jamb splintered. Kicked in. “Dammit, Rogers,” he snarled¸ “why the hell didn’t you wait for us?”

  “She wouldn’t have if she heard a woman or kids yelling,” Greer observed.

  Frank snarled under his breath. Glock leading the way, he moved through the trailer with the cold skill of more than a decade spent clearing houses and hunting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  A memory ambushed him: pressing down on Randy Carson’s wounded abdomen as blood gushed. Watching his best friend die . . . Dammit, Alex, I’m going to kick your luscious little ass for this.

  He found her struggling to handcuff a barrel-chested bull of a man, who cursed her viciously as they rolled on the floor. To Frank’s utter fury, blood streamed from her cut and swelling lower lip. He holstered his Glock, stepped in, and rammed a fist into the side of the asshole’s jaw. The man fell off Alex into a stunned heap. Frank dropped a knee on his back while Bruce knelt on his ass.

  As the man spat drunken curses, Alex jerked both his beefy wrists together and snapped the cuffs on. She stood, wiping the blood off her cut lip. Hot rage burned in her green eyes. “You should have hit him harder, Frank. This is the asshole who killed Ted.”


  * * *

  Polly scraped her gray-shot chestnut hair back to allow Alex to shoot a cell phone picture of her round, bruised face. She was a short woman who weighed about thirty pounds more than she should, and looked ten years older than Alex knew she was. Evidently marriage to Royce had aged her. “I’d be the first to say Donny’s a mean drunk, but he didn’t murder that deputy.”

  “He knew things that haven’t been released to the public,” Alex told her, looking at the phone’s screen. She cursed; the photo was blurry, probably because the adrenaline crash was making her hands shake. Pulling her elbows in close to her ribs to steady her hands, she tried again. Checked the screen. Better.

  “Didn’t you see the eleven o’clock news?”

  Oh, hell, what did the local media get hold of? “I’ve been at work.”

  “They had video of that deputy beating on this black man they said was his lover. That was what set Donny off. He started ranting about y’all bein’ hypocrites for arrestin’ him for hitting me when the deputy did the same thing.”

  Alex’s stomach dropped into her toes. “Video? Where did they get a video?”

  Polly shrugged. “The news said somebody sent them a link. It’s on YouTube.”

  “YouTube?” Conscious of the three shell-shocked little Royce children watching her, Alex managed to bite back her curses. Who the hell had put a video of Ted and Cal sceneing on the Internet? She knew Ted wouldn’t have done it, and Cal wasn’t that stupid. She supposed it was possible someone had shot it at the party, though the Millers strictly forbade cameras. If that was the case, Cap was going to kill whoever had done it.

  Which did Cal, Ted, and the MCSO no damned good whatsoever. The fallout was going to suck. Being gay was bad enough—but being kinky? The scandal was virtually guaranteed to blow up into a shitstorm that could cost the sheriff the next election. Alex and Frank could end up fired if the same asshole had somehow gotten video of them, too.

  No, that wasn’t likely, she told herself, struggling to control her paranoid panic. Their scenes had been conducted in private.

  At least with Frank. The ones with Gary . . . Oh God, Mom and Dad. If they saw some of the things I did with Gary . . . She was going to be sick.

  Calm the fuck down, Alex told herself, dragging herself back under control. Don’t freak until you have a reason to. Nobody shot any video of me. I would have noticed.

  But who the hell had made the one of Cal and Ted?

  * * *

  Frank and Bruce wrestled the handcuffed Donny Royce through the trailer, planning to stuff him in the backseat of one of patrol cars for his ride to jail. “I’m going to have your badge, bitch!” the man shouted back at Alex, who was talking to his wife. “This is police brutality! You broke my goddamn tooth!”

  “Police brutality? Seriously?” Frank growled. “You outweigh Rogers by fifty fucking pounds. The judge will laugh your ass out of court.”

  Yet Alex had gone up against the beefy bastard by herself. Frank was going to give her a spanking she wouldn’t forget. And not the fun kind either.

  “I’ll take him to jail and get him booked in,” Bruce volunteered. “I figure Alex is going to have her hands full with the family.”

  At that, Royce started blustering again. “You don’t tell that bitch anything, Polly, you hear me? You or the kids! Or you’ll answer to me!”

  “Shut your mouth, asshole,” Bruce snapped. “Or I’ll show you what real police brutality looks like.”

  Donny paled and shut up. Like most bullies, he was only tough with somebody he outweighed. He didn’t give them any trouble when they stuffed him into the back of Bruce’s car.

  As Bruce slammed the door, Frank growled, “She’s lucky he didn’t kill her before we got there. She should have waited for backup.”

  “Lone Ranger’s got nothing on Rogers. Any woman needs rescuing, she’s gonna hat up and ride.” Something bitter flashed in Bruce’s eyes. “She’s like her daddy that way.”

  “That’s all well and good, but if you get yourself killed, nobody gets rescued.” Randy Carson’s blood gushed over his hands as he tried to hold pressure on the gut wound . . . It could have been Alex. He didn’t want to go through that again.

  “You gotta remember, Rogers is compensating for a handicap.”

  Frank stared. He had examined Alex’s pretty body thoroughly, and he hadn’t seen a damn thing that needed compensation. “What handicap?”

  The deputy grinned. “Tits.”

  Frank snorted and spoke before he thought. “Believe me, Alex’s tits do not constitute a handicap.”

  Greer lifted a brow as he opened the driver’s door. “I never thought so.” He drove off, Donny sitting hunched and sullen in the back.

  An ambulance rolled in, red lights flashing. Frank led the two paramedics inside, where the Royce kids huddled on the couch, bruised and crying silently. He knew what that felt like—afraid to sob lest it draw the erratic attention of a parent who might take offense.

  He found Alex in the trailer’s short hallway, talking in low-voiced tones to the children’s mother.

  “No, you’re right,” the woman was saying, to Alex’s obvious satisfaction. “I’m leaving the son of a bitch. It’s one thing for him to take his shit out on me, but this time he hurt the kids. I’m done.”

  “That’s definitely the smartest thing you could do. If you don’t get out now, it will only get worse. I can take you to the women’s shelter tonight, but there are other county programs that can help you find a job, get an apartment . . .”

  “Actually, I think I’m going to leave town.” Determination filled the eye that hadn’t swollen shut. “My brother lives in California—works for a Silicon Valley startup. He’s told me a bunch of times he’d take me and the kids in when I decided to get the hell away from Donny.”

  “That might be wise. Sometimes a clean start somewhere else is safest in situations like this.”

  “Yeah,” Polly said grimly. “It’s when you leave that men like Donny try to kill you.”

  Alex winced. Frank wondered why; it was true, though he hadn’t wanted to say so in front of the children. He started to offer to help gather the family’s things, but Alex turned to him. “Fr—” She broke off and corrected herself, “Deputy Murphy, would you mind covering our areas while I take Mrs. Royce and her children to the shelter?”

  “Of course.” He gave her a cool look. “I do have something to discuss with you when you get time.”

  A trace of wariness lit her green gaze. “Ah. Sure.”

  Turning, he stalked out.

  * * *

  Bradfield Auto Seating was a small firm that specialized in manufacturing leather seat and wheel covers. Since the facility didn’t operate a third shift, that left its loading dock unoccupied from midnight to 7 a.m. For the past couple of years, Ted, Bruce, and Alex had been in the habit of parking there between calls, since it was located on the border where the three patrol areas met. The garage was a good place to write the reports policing always generated. There was room in the loading dock for the deputies to park the cars three abreast and work. Tonight, of course, the third car sitting in the darkened garage wasn’t Ted’s, but Frank’s.

  That realization gave Alex a pang when she arrived at Bradfield after delivering Polly Royce and her children to the Sharon Mayhew Crisis Shelter. Polly’s brother had already gone online to buy plane tickets for her and the kids. They’d be out of Donny’s reach before he knew what hit him. Polly would go to court to seek a divorce and custody. She had ample documentation to show he was an abusive prick, so she should have no trouble getting it. Especially since Alex had made sure to take cell phone photos documenting the children’s injuries.

  Alex was writing the incident report on her unit’s laptop when she heard Bruce drive off on a patrol of his area. No sooner had he left than Frank rapped on the passenger window. Rolling it down, Alex gave him a grin. “Well, hello, handsome . . .”

  “Unlock the door,” he gr
owled.

  Her brows lifting, she obeyed, watching as he dropped into the passenger seat and slammed the door before giving her a hot look. “What. The. Fuck?” he snarled. He wasn’t just irritated, she realized. He looked downright furious, his sexy mouth tight, his gray eyes stormy.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You couldn’t wait five minutes for me to get there before charging into the goddamn trailer? What if that bastard had a gun?”

  “Donny? He does have a gun. More than one, in fact.”

  “That does not make it better! Did it not occur to you he could have shot you?”

  “I was more worried he’d shoot his wife and children. They were screaming their lungs out when I drove up. I wasn’t sure how far away you were or how quickly you’d arrive. I didn’t think—”

  “No, you didn’t think. What good does it do to go riding to the rescue like the frickin’ Lone Ranger if you get your ass blown out of the saddle?”

  She was starting to get as pissed off as he obviously was. “Frank, I’m not going to sit in the damned car with my thumb up my butt while innocent people are in danger. That is not what the sheriff pays me to do.”

  “He doesn’t pay you to get shot either.”

  “Would we be having this conversation if I had a dick?”

  “I wouldn’t be sleeping with you if you had a dick!”

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “What do you think Ted would have to say about this little stunt?”

  “That it’s my damned job!” She took a deep breath. “Look, I usually do wait for backup—I’m not stupid. But if I think somebody may end up getting badly hurt before my backup can arrive, I’m not going to wait. And somehow, I don’t think you would either.”

  “I can handle a guy like Royce a lot more easily than you can.”

  “Maybe, but you’re no more bulletproof than I am.” She glowered at him. “I’m a cop. One way or another, I’m going to do the job. If that means taking a calculated risk to keep innocent people safe, I’ll take the fucking risk. I know you’re not used to working with women, but you’re going to have to deal. I will not quit doing whatever my judgment tells me is necessary because you don’t like me taking a chance. Especially not because I happen to be female!”