by Jon Talton
“Don’t move a fucking muscle!” Kimbrough shouted, easing himself up the ridge, his gun drawn. “We’ve got SWAT snipers who will take you out before you even inhale!” The red lightning bugs wiggled on Davidson’s chest. It was the distraction I needed to pull out my big Colt.
Davidson’s handsome, lined face broke into a crazy smile. “Shit,” he said, waving his arms dreamily, holding out the pistols. “I captured an escaped convict! That’s Leo O’Keefe, right there. He shot Peralta. He was going to shoot the sheriff here. I stopped him.”
Kimbrough was at my side, his dark Glock leveled at Davidson’s chest. Davidson started toward us, then stopped. We held our ground. Davidson seemed suddenly disoriented. He looked at the lasers on his chest, then glanced out at the city.
“I’m going to be the chief deputy,” he said, tears running down his rugged face. “Shit.”
Suddenly a low roar came over the mountain and descended toward us, then it turned into a bone-rattling windstorm and we were lit up like judgment day. Davidson stared at the helicopter, fifty feet above us. I stepped forward and hammered him under his chin, dropping him to the ground. I grabbed the revolver and Kimbrough wrestled away the semiautomatic. He looked at us as if he were awakening from a dream.
“You’ve got to kill me, Mapstone,” he yelled, his face death-white in the spotlight of the chopper. “You can’t send a cop to prison.” He reached for my gun. “Goddamn it! You owe me that!”
I pushed him back down and stepped back. Then I felt the dark shapes of the SWAT officers swarming around us. One of them roughly handcuffed Davidson and hauled him to his feet.
“Take him to jail,” I said.
***
A long convoy of emergency vehicles trickled back down the mountain. The chopper sailed off toward downtown. I sat off to myself and watched, a solitary figure on a cold, dark boulder. Behind me, the house was dark. The ghosts of Jonathan Ledger and Dean Nixon watched us in worldly silence. When I felt a hand on my shoulder, I was shivering from the cold.
“History Shamus, I’m here to take you home.”
I just sat and shook my head. Lindsey came down close and wrapped her arms around me.
“We have ‘Protect and Serve’ written on our cars,” I said. “We didn’t do that with Leo, now did we?”
“You did the best you could, Dave,” she said.
“Not good enough.”
She whispered, “Oh, baby. Come home now.”
She sat beside me, and for long time I just savored her warmth and softness as counterpoint to the rock beneath me. Then we stood up and I brushed away her dark hair, ran my finger down her cheekbone. Her eyes were full of tears, and then mine were, too. I didn’t know why I was blessed enough to be loved in a cold, deadly world where everything was at risk.
“What happened?” I gently touched the empty skin of her nostril, where the nose stud used to be. “Are you going back in uniformed duty?”
She shook her head and smiled. “Oh, Dave. The world turns around. Life goes on.” She held up her hand. The engagement ring sparkled. “This is the jewel I need in my life now.”
I kissed her lightly and slipped my hand around her waist, so familiar and so wondrous. We stood in the darkness of the mountainside, alone now. The great desert city spread out at our feet, vast and charmed and cursed, destiny and history, a billion electric diamonds, shimmering with possibilities.
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