Protect and Serve: Soldiers, SEALs and Cops: Contemporary Heroes from NY Times and USA Today and other bestselling authors

by J. M. Madden

  “Some men feel like they do. Like it’s the only way they’ll ever get a woman to have sex with them.”

  Will nodded. “Then no, I don’t have to rape anyone. I’ve never felt like that.”

  “Some men do. Stan said he raped me the first time because I kept turning him down. That I was giving it to everyone else, and why was I refusing to give it to him?”

  Will went still. “The first time?”

  Oh. Right. I hadn’t mentioned that.

  “It happened twice,” I told him. Somehow, it was easier to get the words out than I’d feared, even if my voice shook a little. “The first time was the year you were in Key West. I didn’t know about it until two years later. I don’t remember it. If he hadn’t confessed, I’d never have known.” And that might have been better.

  “But it happened a second time?”

  I nodded. “During the trial. He escaped.”

  “We heard,” Will said. “Law enforcement all over South Florida was looking for him, just in case he came our way. He was caught the next day, though, wasn’t he? Still in Key West?”

  “He was.” He’d been on the loose for less than twenty-four hours. He had me for less than nine of those. It doesn’t sound like a long time. Not unless you’re living through it. And hoping you’ll survive.

  “What happened?” Will asked, his voice gentle.

  I swallowed. “Everyone thought he’d go after Cassie, since Cassie was the one who put him in prison. So Ty stuck with Cassie to protect her. And Enrique was working around the clock to find Stan. Juan, my other brother, was in the hospital. So were two of Enrique’s cops, because Stan had shot them when he made his escape. There was nobody to spare for protection. And nobody was worried about me. I wasn’t really worried, either. I was mostly upset that Ty chose to go home with Cassie.”

  “Who’s Ty?”

  “FBI agent,” I said. “Everyone was back in Key West to testify. Ty and Cassie and another of the girls Stan raped. Paula. Everyone was worried about them. Nobody was worried about me. So I was alone when Stan came for me.”

  Will didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

  “He knocked me out. Not with drugs this time. With a length of pipe, or something. Took me to a house, tied me up, and raped me.” For a long time, and with great enthusiasm. I could hear my voice shake when I continued, and felt the tears press at the back of my eyes. “I thought he was going to kill me. I think he might have, if Ty and Enrique hadn’t come to the house the next morning. They chased him off. Enrique and I ended up in the hospital.”

  “And Laszlo went back to prison.”

  I nodded. “We have to find this guy, Will. He could be out there right now, raping another woman. We have to find him and put him away.”

  “Tomorrow,” Will said. “We’ll try again tomorrow. We’ll keep trying until we catch him.”

  “If we don’t catch him tomorrow, will you consider going to the media?”

  He hesitated. “He might have taken the night off. If we get lucky, maybe he did. But yeah, if there’s a new victim tomorrow morning, I’ll talk to my dad about it.”

  It was probably the best I could hope for. “I guess it’s time to call it a night.” The sooner I went to bed, the sooner I’d wake up.

  And find out whether the rapist had struck again while I’d been sleeping.

  Will tilted his head to look at me. “You want me to stay? On the couch?”

  “There is no couch.”

  “You know what I mean,” Will said. “I won’t touch you. Not unless you want me to.”

  “I don’t. No offense. It isn’t you. I’m just not ready for that.”

  He nodded.

  “And no, I don’t need you to stay. I feel safe here.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned to the door. “Get some sleep.”

  “You, too,” I told him, and closed and locked the door behind him.

  It wasn’t even three minutes later when the knock came. I didn’t think anything of opening the door again, since I figured he’d made it down to the first floor before he realized he’d forgotten to get the earbud out of my ear—as I had realized when I started to take my earrings out—and that he was coming back for it. So I just swung the door open with the earbud in my hand. “Here you... oh.”

  “Thank you,” Duane said and plucked it out of my hand.

  I blinked and fell back a step. “What are you doing here?”

  It wasn’t intended as an invitation, but he stepped across the threshold and into my apartment. “Just making sure you got home safe.”

  “As you can see,” I said. And added, my voice tense, when he turned to lock the door, “What are you doing?”

  He smiled, and I wondered why I’d never noticed before how long his incisors were. Almost like vampire-teeth. “Just making sure we won’t get interrupted again.”

  “We didn’t get interrupted earlier,” I said.

  He nodded. “Sure we did. Will interrupted us.”

  “He was doing his job.” And hadn’t he explained that to Duane? He’d said he had.

  “We were together,” Duane said. “It was rude to interrupt.”

  “We weren’t together. We were two people who happened to meet at a night club. That doesn’t mean we were together.”

  Duane’s face darkened. I took a step back and tried to make sure my voice was steady. “Thank you for coming to check on me. But as you can see I’m fine. You can leave now.”

  “When I’m ready,” Duane said.

  “I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”

  “Good,” Duane said. “So do I.”

  “I want to go to bed alone.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Duane said, and put a hand on his gun.

  I stared at him, incredulous. “Are you kidding me? I’m not sleeping with you. Especially not at gunpoint. Have you lost your mind?”

  “No,” Duane said, scowling. “You’re laughing at me.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m not.” Although of course I had been. Until I realized that it wasn’t a good idea.

  Not a good idea at all, in fact. Duane pulled his gun from the holster. “Get on the bed.”

  I took a step in that direction. It’s hard not to, when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun. I didn’t want to get on the bed, but I didn’t want to get shot, either.

  “You do realize you won’t get away with this? I’m looking straight at you. Unless you plan to kill me after you’re done,” like some weirdly inverted black widow spider, “I can identify you.”

  “Nobody will believe you,” Duane said. “Everyone knows you’re a slut.”

  My body went cold. “Excuse me?”

  “You slept with so many men you can’t remember all of them,” Duane said.

  It was hard to get my lips to move. They were cold and stiff. “How do you know that?”

  He smirked. “I was at the trial.”

  “Stan’s trial? You were in Key West for Stan’s trial?”

  “I was interested,” Duane said simply. “I recognized you as soon as I saw you in Murphy’s Law the other night. You look different, but I knew who you were. And I figured you’d sleep with anybody, so all I had to do was talk to you, and I’d get laid.”

  The cold feeling gave way to a wave of hot anger. “I guess you didn’t pay attention during the trial. Stan raped me because I turned him down. I don’t sleep with anybody.”

  Anybody at all these days. But I’d always had standards, even back in the old days. They’d been the wrong standards, perhaps, but I’d drawn the line at Stan. I would have drawn it at Duane, too. And not for the right reasons, but I wouldn’t have slept with him four years ago, either. No matter how drunk I was.

  “It’s you,” I added, figuring I had nothing to lose, “isn’t it? You’re who we’ve been looking for.” Black pants, black shirt, utility belt. The hat was probably downstairs in his car. “The rapist.”

  Duane looked insulted. “I ne
ver raped anyone. They wanted it.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “They dressed like whores,” Duane said, “and they were walking the streets. When I touched them, they never told me to stop.”

  “You mean, when you had them assume the position against the car or a handy wall, and you patted them down?” My voice was shaking again, but with rage this time. “No, they wouldn’t have told you to stop. They didn’t want to be arrested. They were hoping you’d let them go home. And you’re going to use that to tell me they didn’t say no?”

  Duane looked taken aback. I don’t think it was my righteous indignation or anything I said. I think it was the fact that I was so angry I was shaking. I pushed the hand with the gun away with no thought whatsoever for the fact that he could have shot me, and stuck my finger in his face. “It’s not their fault that you can’t get laid, you ignorant moron. They don’t owe you anything. You’re not entitled to a woman just because you want one. We don’t exist just for your pleasure!”

  He hit me. Swung the hand with the gun in an arc and hit me on the side of the head. And because I was too angry to see it coming, he knocked me sideways. The four inch heels I was still wearing didn’t help, either: I went down hard on the floor, and in the few seconds it took me to catch my breath, he was on me.

  The only good thing about it was that he dropped the gun. The bad thing was that that left both his hands free, to wrap around my throat and squeeze.

  And I lost it. I hadn’t been able to fight back against Stan. The first time I hadn’t known what was going on, and the second I’d already been tied up when I came to. And I’m not sure I would have known what to do anyway. Stan had been a cop. He’d been trained in hand-to-hand combat. I hadn’t. Not then.

  And he’d been a big guy, tall and lanky, with a much longer reach than I had.

  Duane was smaller. Not a lot taller than me, if considerably more muscular. But this time I had the training. And I was so beside myself with rage that I didn’t even feel the pain he was inflicting. I scratched and clawed and kicked and punched. I shrieked and cursed, in ways that would have made my mother turn pale. And I wrenched the baton from the belt at his waist and started hitting him with it.

  I literally saw red. Or if not red, I didn’t see what was going on around me. The whole world narrowed to just my need to kill Stan, to keep hitting him until he stopped breathing, stopped hurting me. My blood was rushing in my ears, and it took time before I realized that the sound I was hearing wasn’t just my heart beating. It was someone knocking on the door.

  I blinked.

  Stan... no, Stan wasn’t here. Stan was in the Stock Island Detention Center. Duane was on the floor curled up in a fetal position. Maybe I’d inadvertently—or not so inadvertently—kneed him in the groin.

  Somebody was knocking on the door.

  I got to my feet. I was in pain, but it felt distant, numb. Everything hurt, but in a low-grade, buzzing sort of way.

  It would probably hurt like hell later.

  I opened the door with the baton still in my hand.

  “Whoa,” Will said, staring at me. From the shock on his face, I gathered I didn’t look so good. There was a mirror next to the front door, and I turned to peer into it.

  No. Not good at all. My hair was straggling, the neckline of my dress was torn, my lip was bleeding, and I had the beginnings of a black eye, probably where Duane had hit me with the gun.

  “Shit,” Will added. He moved in a blur, past me and in front of me. “Drop it.”

  I turned around and peered past him. Duane wasn’t curled up in a ball anymore. He had found his gun, and was sitting on the floor, pointing it at us.

  “Shoot him,” I said. My voice was hoarse, probably from all the screaming. “He raped them all. He attacked me. He doesn’t deserve to live. Shoot him.”

  Duane blinked. He looked bad. No worse than I did, but I’d managed to do some damage to him, too. He had bleeding furrows down his cheek and throat—I probably had skin under my fingernails—and a fat lip, as well.

  “It’s up to you,” Will said calmly. To Duane, not me. It wasn’t up to me. I knew that. I just wanted him dead, really badly. “You can drop it and face the music. Or I can shoot you.”

  There was a beat. And another.

  Duane dropped the gun and put his hands behind his head. Will handed me his gun and went to cuff Duane. In a nice piece of irony, he used Duane’s own handcuffs. Probably the same handcuffs Duane had used on Maria last night.

  Will yanked him to his feet, none too gently, and marched him toward the door. “Hospital?” he asked me.

  I shook my head. “I can take care of it.” And I’d had enough of hospitals. For the rest of my life, if it was up to me. Or at least until I was hurt worse than I was right now.

  Will nodded. “I’ll take him in and book him. I’ll get your statement tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.” I followed them to the door. “How did you know to come back?”

  “The dark sedan?” Will said. “The one on the street a couple blocks from Courant? It was registered to Duane.”

  Of course.

  He looked me up and down. “Take a shower and an aspirin. And put some ice or something on that eye. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He pushed Duane in front of him out the door. I locked it behind them and went to wash the blood and the sweat and the feel of Duane’s hands off my body.

  EIGHT

  “And so we thought you might like to stay here,” Assistant Chief Murphy said, with a glance at his son, “and continue working with Will.”

  It was the next day. I had given Will my statement in the morning, and he had told me that Maria and the other victims had already been in to view a lineup. Maria had picked Duane out right away, after hearing his voice. The other two had been a little less sure, but had eventually fingered Duane, too. Unlike Stan, Duane wasn’t talking, but Will assured me that between Maria’s testimony and identification, the other women’s testimony and identification, and the attack on me, it was more than enough to get Duane off the streets for years.

  And then he’d taken me to see his dad, the Assistant Chief, who had made me an offer it was hard to refuse.

  Although I tried. Or at least I didn’t jump on the chance the moment it was presented to me.

  “I assumed, after finishing the Police College, I’d become a patrol officer,” I said.

  He nodded. “You can become a patrol officer, if that’s what you want. That’s usually what happens. But we thought you might be better suited for the special investigations team. There are uniformed officers attached there, and in three years, you could take the detective exam and get promoted.”

  “And in the meantime...?”

  “You’d do grunt-work for me,” Will said with a grin. “Canvassing around crime scenes, knocking on doors, checking alibis. Writing reports.”

  “Being bait?”

  He shrugged. “If that’s what was needed.” Then the grin disappeared, and he added, “You wouldn’t have to go back to Key West.”

  No, I wouldn’t. And believe me, it was a factor.

  “I’ve spoken with your brother,” Will’s dad told me. “He said it was up to you. That he wasn’t sure you’d make it through training in the first place, and that they weren’t counting on you coming back.”

  That wasn’t very nice of Enrique. Then again, he’d never made me feel like he doubted my ability to finish training, so maybe I just wouldn’t say anything to him about it.

  “Do I have to decide right now? Or can I think about it?”

  “Of course,” Assistant Chief Murphy said, with a glance at Will. Maybe Will had thought I’d jump at the chance. “Think about it. Talk to your brother and your parents. Decide whether Miami is somewhere you want to be. We’re not Key West.”

  No. And while that was a benefit, it was also something I’d have to take into consideration before I made any kind of decision.

  “It’s not th
at I don’t appreciate the offer,” I told him. “I do. Very much. It’s just... not what I thought I’d be doing.” Or where I thought I’d be doing it.

  Chief Murphy nodded. “We’d like to have you stick around, but if you feel your calling is elsewhere, we’ll understand. Just give it some thought. And thanks for all your work on the Henderson matter.”

  “I was happy to help,” I said, and got to my feet, since it sounded like a dismissal. “Thank you very much, Chief Murphy.”

  “Thank you, Officer Fuentes.” He stood to shake my hand. “How about you come back tomorrow morning and tell me what you’ve decided? Say, eleven o’clock?”

  I told him that would be fine—surely I’d be able to make a decision by then—and then Will said, “See you later, Dad,” and escorted me out of the office.

  “That’s ‘Chief Dad’ to you,” his father threw after him just before the door closed.

  Will grinned.

  “So that’s your father,” I said when we were outside the building and on the street, under the bright Miami sun, with the heat radiating up from the pavement under our feet.

  He nodded. “He liked you.”

  I’d liked him, too. Enough that I thought I could work under him. It was working with Will that was going to be the problem.

  “Why?” he wanted to know when I said so. A flash of something—hurt?—crossed his face.

  “Because we have a past. And I don’t want to assume that you’d be interested in picking up where we left off four years ago. But...”

  He glanced at me. “But?”

  But I’d learned to appreciate him over the past couple of days. And while I probably wouldn’t cry myself to sleep if he told me he wasn’t interested in me as anything but a coworker, I also wasn’t ready to pick things up anywhere near where we’d been four years ago.

  “I like you,” I said. “But I’m not ready for a relationship. I don’t know how long it’ll be before I am. If I ever am. So if you’re carrying a torch, or anything...”

  He grinned. “I wouldn’t call it that. Although I like you, too.”

  Good to know. “I just don’t want things to be awkward.”

  “They won’t be,” Will said. “I won’t put any pressure on you. I like you. And I understand that you’re not in a position where you’re comfortable around men right now.”