HARD FAL

by CJ Lyons

  “For ten years I had no voice,” I continue. “Now that I have the power to speak, I can tell you honestly, yes. I will sleep better tonight knowing that justice has been served and that Mr. White will never harm anyone again. Then I will wake up tomorrow, scared and alone and cowering, too afraid to step foot outside, but I will walk outside into a world that for me is filled with danger. Because, despite everything taken from me, I have the power to set things right. One thief at a time. One predator at a time.”

  Chapter 18

  “MEGAN,” LUCY SHOUTED after her daughter. She spun to go after her, torquing her ankle and releasing a howl of pain.

  Nick shook his head. “Give her some space.”

  “I guess she’d rather it was Taylor here instead of me.” Lucy hated the bitterness that the words emerged with. Damn, couldn’t she do anything right?

  She hated even more the fact that clearly she had no remedy for Megan’s pain. The trauma counselor said it would take time, to give Megan space if she needed it, but all Lucy seemed to be able to do was to make things worse.

  “Would’ve helped if you answered any of her calls,” Nick said as he hung up his coat with measured movements.

  “What calls?” Lucy slid her phone free. Three missed calls, all from Megan. “Shit. We took the back way here, past the dam.” The state park tried to use their lack of Wi-Fi and cell coverage as an incentive for folks to take a vacation from the stress of the modern world, but it was still damn inconvenient.

  “Then maybe you could have called her. Or me. Let us know you were all right.”

  “I’m all right? Of course I’m all right—” She stopped, realized he knew about the attack on June and Seth. Damn Internet. She glanced down the hall where Megan had gone, assessing the possibilities.

  “She saw you, Lucy. Driving like a maniac, flying over a cliff—”

  “It was barely a six foot hill.” Well, maybe eight feet. Still, they weren’t talking an Evel Knievel stunt. More dangerous for the Subaru than for her. Anyway, that wasn’t her main concern. If video had caught the car chase, it might also have caught her face—or some enterprising reporter might have discovered she was there at the scene. No way would any of her people leak it, but…

  Seth, his timing impeccable, emerged from the kitchen behind Lucy. “Hi, there. Seth Bernhart,” he introduced himself. “The pregnant lady Lucy helped is my wife, June. I just want to thank you both for everything you’ve done. Lucy saved her life—and my baby’s.”

  Nick flushed. Never a good sign—usually he was the one who kept his emotions in check, dealing with them rationally, while Lucy tended to simply let loose and apologize later.

  As he took the few stiff steps necessary to meet Seth in the middle of the living room Lucy realized she wasn’t the only one completely off balance. And it wasn’t just because of what happened today. This was about more than what happened two months ago. Ever since they’d moved here to Pittsburgh, her job—the promotion that was meant to keep her safe behind a desk and home on time for soccer games and family dinners—had not only endangered Lucy time and again but also their entire family.

  And Coletta had paid the price. But she wasn’t the only one. Megan could barely look at Lucy or be in the same room with her, and Nick…Nick, he was overwhelmed, playing both mother and father to Megan, therapist and rehab partner for Lucy, cook, cleaner, and house maid, executor of all the legal stuff that went along with Coletta’s death, and the safety net holding their entire family together.

  Exhausting—for both of them. For Lucy it was just as stressful to watch from the sidelines as it was for Nick to be taking on everything himself.

  “Nick Callahan,” he said, shaking Seth’s hand. His voice held none of the warmth it usually would have. In fact, it was so cold Lucy wished for her coat.

  “Nice to meet you, Nick. I’ll just go check on June.” Seth gave her an encouraging glance before disappearing down the hall.

  Lucy stared across the distance that separated her and her husband. Nick glared back. He remained on the opposite side of the living room while she waited for him in the archway leading into the kitchen. Neither of them made a move to get closer.

  Okay. It was going to be one of those fights.

  She shifted her weight, immediately regretted it as pain shot through her ankle. Her cane was behind her in the kitchen but damn if she was going to retreat to get it.

  He took aim first. “The men today. The ones with guns. The ones sent by a vicious sociopathic obsessed pedophile to hurt a pregnant woman. Did you catch them yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then, they’re still after her.” He held up a hand as she opened her mouth to explain. “I don’t need to know why you did what you did. Honestly, I don’t really care. Not right this moment. I need to know if our daughter is in danger because you brought those people here.”

  Lucy flinched at his words. More so at the assumption behind them. As if she hadn’t been calculating the risk the moment Megan stepped through the door. If he couldn’t trust her judgment, trust her to know what she was doing, trust that she would always put him and Megan before the job…but that was the problem wasn’t it? The job. What it did to her. What it did to them.

  Silence gathered between them. Usually she loved how in sync she and Nick could be, how they seldom needed words to communicate the important things. One more thing lost since the attack on her and her family two months ago.

  Now they couldn’t even fight like they usually did. Instead, they both held back as if afraid of hurting the other, damaging the strained threads holding their family together.

  As the silence grew, she remembered her father’s words: never start a fight, but always finish it. Two months ago those words had given her the strength to survive, now they humbled her with their deeper meaning.

  Her glance caught on the photos over the fireplace. Laughing, happy, proud. Family. She focused on her parents’ wedding photo and thought of the advice her mother gave her on her own wedding day.

  Just because you love a man doesn’t make him a saint, she’d said. But you found one of the good ones. Don’t take him for granted.

  Lucy’s inhalation shuddered through her and she stepped forward. One step then another, almost within touching distance of Nick. She held his gaze like a lifeline.

  Then she said the two words she could live forever and never say often enough. Two words that were the first she thought each morning when she woke and the last before she fell asleep at night.

  “Thank you.”

  He straightened, tilting his head as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. She dared one more step but resisted the urge to touch him and repeated, “Thank you.”

  She wanted to smile at his startled expression. It wasn’t often she was able to surprise Nick—he knew her better than she knew herself—but when she did, it almost always resulted in laughter and tears of joy.

  Like the day she’d ended up in the ER, sent there with a minor injury that occurred during an assignment, and Nick rushed to her bedside. They’d only been married a year, neither used to the unique demands her job placed on a marriage, but all that paled when she told him what the doctors had found: she was pregnant.

  “Thank me? For what?” he asked, his expression still puzzled. But as he considered her words he relaxed, his hands unclenched, breathing slowing. Her balance wavered as she leaned too much weight on her bad foot. He steadied her, his palms on her hips.

  “For everything. For being here. For staying with me, even when everything goes to shit despite my best intentions.”

  “Lucy. Are you okay?” He frowned. “Did something happen that you haven’t told me about?”

  No. No she wasn’t. She’d thought she was, thought she was ready, but returning to work had been more about denying everything that had happened two months ago than it was about salvaging her career. Now, being here, smelling her mother’s perfume, seeing her everywhere, hearing her ghost in her head, she had to fac
e the truth: she wasn’t okay. She wasn’t sure if she could ever be again.

  “Let’s sit. Get you off that leg.”

  He guided her onto the couch, and she wondered...what if what she was suffering from wasn’t simply grief and the trauma of recovering from what had happened two months ago? What if this constant empty feeling was something worse? Something even Nick couldn’t treat?

  He sat down beside her, wove his fingers between hers, his thumb rubbing her new wedding ring. She’d lost her original one two months ago…had lost so very much that night.

  “Do you think I don’t know?” he asked.

  “Know what?” she said nonchalantly but she must have tensed enough that he knew he’d hit his target.

  “You need to stop it, Lucy. For two months now all you’ve been doing is running and hiding. Running to rehab, to doctors’ appointments, to the damn gun range. Running away from me and Megan, from facing what happened to your mom, from facing your future. And now you’re hiding from a predator.”

  He took her silence as permission for him to continue playing counselor. Give a guy a PhD…of course, she couldn’t complain. Not like she ever turned her job off, not fully.

  Just look at where they were now.

  “I just want…” She paused, frightened to voice what she really wanted. Her words emerged in a child-like whisper. “I just want everything to go back to the way it was.”

  “Magical thinking,” he chided her—her default when she was overwhelmed. It was one of the reasons why she threw herself into her cases; the wish/hope/belief that if she could save her victims, stop the big bad wolf from hurting them, then maybe she could keep the evil in the world from hurting her family. Build up some good karma or the like.

  “No,” she told Nick. “I can’t think that way, not any more, not after—” She glanced down at her ankle but it was her mother’s face that filled her vision.

  “But you’ve thought like that for so long, you don’t have anything to replace it with. Lucy, don’t you see, you never needed it in the first place? You don’t need an excuse to be passionate about your job, about the people you help—you wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with if you lost that. There’s no reason to feel guilty about that or make up some silly deal with the universe to justify your passion.”

  “Of course I feel guilty! How can you even say that? Here, of all places.”

  He squeezed her hand. “You almost died trying to save us—all of us. You chose us over the FBI. You did everything right. Do you really think your mother blames you for not predicting what a psychopath would do?”

  She didn’t have an answer to that. “I’m not sure I can still do my job. It hurts so much.” He knew she wasn’t talking about her leg. “Seeing what it does to you and especially Megan.” She shrugged. “First day back on the job and look where we are.”

  “You need to find a middle ground. Some way to keep your need to help people separate from your need to protect your family. Other law enforcement officers do it.”

  She didn’t need to remind him that most of them failed miserably. She could count on three fingers the number of happily married agents she knew—and they all had supervisory positions that kept them out of the field. Divorce was almost the rule among the men and women who did her job.

  Never. She’d quit the job before she quit her family. “I don’t know how.”

  “Maybe Greally is right—it’s time for you to transition into a position that will let you do both.”

  She scoffed at that. “I don’t think taking a job investigating my co-workers is the answer.”

  Nick pulled her close and kissed the top of her head. “We don’t need to decide now. But we do need to keep talking. All of us, Megan included.”

  She glanced down the hallway. Wondered what June, Seth, and Megan were talking about. “You know, if there’s video of me out there, then you and Megan are safer here than at home. You should stay the night.” It was ironic, but since her mother’s home was in a trust not associated with Lucy’s name, they would be safer here than anywhere else.

  His lips tightened but he nodded at that. “All of us?” He meant her.

  “Unless something breaks. I don’t want to risk asking the locals for help—too easy for word to get out. And we can’t offer June official protection. But I’ll ask Walden to come up as soon as he’s free from the hospital. He can take June and Seth to a safe house and then you won’t have to worry.”

  “Hospital? Was Walden hurt?”

  “Broken collarbone. Timmy Oshiro got shot but he was wearing his vest. They’ll both be fine.”

  “Oshiro—the deputy US Marshal? Big guy, the nurses all loved him because he brought them home baked pies and cakes while you were in the hospital?” Baking was Oshiro’s stress-reliever, he said he enjoyed the control and the simple pleasure of always knowing everything would come out right if he just played by the rules—something he was famous for not doing on the job. A lot like Lucy that way.

  “Yeah, he’s friends with Seth and June. Between him and Walden, they should have plenty of protection.” Even as she said it, she made a note to herself to ask a few of the other agents in her squad if they’d mind helping out—two walking wounded would work in the short term, for tonight, but Seth and June needed to prepare for a longer siege. No way was Daddy going to give up on June. And there was no telling how many others were searching for her.

  Nick relaxed, trusting her judgment—a gift that meant more to her than she had words to express. He nodded, stood, and lowered a hand to help her.

  “We good?” he asked. She hated that he had to—how far gone was she that her husband of fifteen years, a man who used to be able to read an entire day via a twitch of her eyebrow when she walked inside the door, had to ask?

  She stood, turned in his embrace, wrapped her arms around his neck, and pulled him down for a kiss. Despised herself that even that intimacy felt distant, as if she was beyond her body, watching herself. Tried her best to sink into it, to let her body communicate her depth of feeling.

  And failed. If Nick realized that, he didn’t show it as they pulled apart.

  But Lucy knew better. Even if she was too damn numb to feel it.

  Chapter 19

  LUCY AND NICK moved back out to the kitchen. She finished her geographic profile while he began dinner. The aroma of ziti and meatballs filled the kitchen. She called Taylor and forwarded her results to him. It was hard to focus with so many childhood memories wafting through her olfactory senses. Her mom would have never approved of feeding company frozen leftovers. She would have made everything fresh, from scratch.

  Taylor sounded excited—but then, he always sounded that way. “You narrowed it down to an area in southeast Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and—”

  “And a tiny part of West Virginia and Maryland,” she finished. “I know it’s a lot of ground to cover, not sure if it will be much help.”

  “No, boss, this is great. Finally something concrete to give me some search parameters.”

  Nick sat down beside Lucy, making a shopping list while absently stroking her arm with his free hand. Maybe the fight wasn’t over—they definitely hadn’t resolved anything, hadn’t even begun to discuss her career options—but this detente was nice. It helped her feel not quite as out of step with Nick and her family, hell, the whole damn world.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Taylor continued, the sound of his fingers pounding his keyboard echoing through the cell phone. “Why did this guy wait until after he’d already sold June to Green Elephant Man before selling the Baby Girl image collection? I mean, he was sitting on a gold mine, right?”

  Lucy had wondered that as well. “Maybe once he found a new victim, he no longer was as emotionally attached to June? Didn’t mind her images out there for others to be using?”

  Nick tapped her arm and shook his head. In between milk and OJ on his shopping list he’d written: obsessed.

  “Or maybe I’m wrong,” she conceded.
Nick was right. Why would their subject—god, how she despised calling him “Daddy,” it defiled every definition of the word, especially here in this house that held the only remaining memories of her own father—why would he still be this obsessed with June now? In her experience, once predators lost interest in their victims, they moved on without looking back again.

  “What about money?” Taylor asked. “Maybe he didn’t get all the money from Green Elephant guy when the deal went sour. Maybe that left him short on cash and he needed to make some fast?”

  “Okay. So emotionally, he’s obsessed with June, that’s why he starts with such young new victims, he hopes to groom them into being just like June. Does that mean he’s still obsessed with her? Even after all these years? And now her being pregnant gives him the perfect chance to bring everything back full circle.”

  Nick nodded his approval at her theory.

  “I don’t know about any of that,” Taylor said. “I’m just saying that if there’s a money trail, we’ve got something we can maybe follow. And according to Green Elephant Man’s case file, he withdrew sums adding up to thirty-two thousand in cash the week before June was found.”

  “That’s a pretty specific number.”

  “I know. Might mean something. I can throw it into the search algorithm, see what pops.”

  “Sounds good. Let me know if you find anything.” She hung up, staring at the map now filled with her colored tracings. “Every time I start to think I understand this guy, it makes me want to run in the other direction.”

  Nick squeezed her hand. “He’s not the worst you’ve come up against. You’ll get him.”

  She wished she had his confidence. But this guy, this Daddy, he felt more twisted than any of the others. More than his warped idea of family. Turning his wrath on Seth after June became pregnant. He could have easily assassinated Seth right there in the street when they first met.