Protector

by Laurel Dewey

  The guy looked around helplessly. “Yeah. Is there a problem, officer?”

  Jane moved closer to the guy in a threatening position. “Yeah, there’s a problem! This song sucks! Anyone with half a fucking brain knows that!”

  “Look, officer, I don’t want any trouble, okay? I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck you!” Jane was almost two inches from the fellow’s face when she looked over to the side. Mike was standing several feet away, obviously distraught. As quickly as Jane turned on the intimidation with the flannel-shirted guy, she turned it off and quickly walked toward her brother. “Mike! What’s wrong?”

  “I figured I’d find you here,” Mike said, holding back tears. Jane threw thirty bucks on the tray of a passing waitress, grabbed Mike gently by the arm and left the bar. The second they walked outside, he turned to the wall and buried his head against the brick. “I fucked up bad, Janie!” Mike said, tears streaming down his face.

  “For God’s sake,” Jane said, trying to turn Mike toward her, “what happened?!”

  “I asked her, just like I told you I would . . .”

  “Asked who? What are you talking about?”

  “Lisa!” Mike said, turning to face Jane. “I asked her to move in with me!”

  “Oh, shit. Mike, what did I tell you? I said you were going to get hurt!”

  “No, it’s not what you think!” Mike whined as he slid down the wall and sat on the pavement.

  “Mike,” Jane said, not sure what to make of her brother’s behavior, “what happened?” Jane knelt down, resting her hands on Mike’s shoulders.

  “We went to dinner and I had a few beers to get a buzz on and get the nerve up. I told Lisa that I wanted her and I to move in together...”

  “And she said ‘no’,” Jane said matter-of-factly.

  “Actually, she said she was gonna ask me the same question.”

  “I’m lost, Mike.”

  “She has some reservations about . . . me . . . and certain things I do.”

  “Everybody’s got reservations about everybody else. So what?”

  “That’s not the biggest part, Janie,” Mike said, burying his face in his hands and crying. “Oh, God, I’m so fucked up!”

  “Mike! What’s the biggest part?”

  “We talked about stuff. About our future, you know? Her and me together and what she wanted in life . . . She wants kids, Janie!” Mike blurted out.

  “So?”

  “Kids. I’d be a father. The more she talked about it, the more scared I got.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If heart problems and strokes can be passed from one family member to another, maybe mental shit can too.”

  Jane tried to process it all. “I don’t know—”

  “What if it turns out I’m just like him?” Mike started to bang on his head with the flat of his hands. “I’ve got to get him out of my head!”

  Jane pulled his hands away from his head. “You’re not making sense!”

  “She wants me to be the father of her kids. I can’t do that! It’s just another goddamn thing I’m never gonna be!” Tears rolled down Mike’s cheeks. “Oh, Janie, you and me, we’re fucking damaged goods. I’d love to be a dad, you know? I think part of me could be real good with kids. But I’m scared that I’d snap one day for no reason and become him.”

  “Mike, look at me. You will never be him. You understand me? Never!”

  “Don’t you ever wonder if it’s like a curse in our blood?”

  “Mike—”

  “You’re lucky you can’t have kids. You don’t have to worry about shit like this.”

  Jane stiffened. “Yeah, Mike,” Jane said quietly. “I’m real lucky.”

  Mike’s eyes trailed off as a pensive look came over his face. “Every time I make a wish, you know what I wish for?”

  “What?”

  “Freedom,” Mike declared. “I want to be free, Janie.” Mike grabbed hold of Jane’s jacket sleeve and dissolved into a flood of raw emotion.

  Jane called a cab for Mike and promised to phone him when she got home. She walked around block for half an hour, puffing nervously on cigarettes. It seemed to Jane that keeping the pieces of her life together was proving more and more difficult. “Freedom,” Jane thought, as Mike’s pronouncement rung in her head. “Good fucking luck,” she surmised. She was on her fifth cigarette by the time the sun sunk behind the tall buildings and she headed back up Milwaukee to her house. Jane was still lost in her own world when she neared her house. Suddenly, from behind her, a set of headlights from a parked car flicked on. Jane turned, blinded by the brightness. Instinctively, she opened her jacket and touched her pistol. A car door opened and closed.

  “Jane.”

  “Chris? Turn off your lights!”

  Chris sauntered over to Jane and stood next to her, spotlighted in the glare. He looked weary, with dark circles under his eyes. “You’re home early.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’ve dropped by here over the last week after work and you’re never here. Maybe if you’d ever have given me a fuckin’ key—”

  “What do you want, Chris?”

  “Oh, fuck, Jane. We’re not at DH. You can take off your balls.” Chris crossed over to the steps by Jane’s front lawn and sat down. He ran his fingers through his tangled blond hair. “Let’s not play this game. I don’t know what happened between us that made you so hateful to me. We’re not perfect, but we still have something going for us. At least I think so.” Jane lit a cigarette and said nothing. “Look,” Chris continued, “I’ve been pulling doubles ever since this Lawrence case. Weyler said I’m almost maxed on overtime. So, I was thinking. We got Memorial Day this weekend. How about you and me take off on Saturday and go up to Lake Dillon and christen my new boat.” Chris pulled a set of keys out of his shirt pocket and tossed them to Jane.

  “Boat?” Jane said, unimpressed.

  Chris leaned back on his elbows. “What can I say? Off-duty jobs pay good bank. Hey, I even treated myself to a pair of custom cowboy boots.” His ruddy face flushed with self-importance. “Custom boots, Jane. Wait’ll you see ’em, babe. They’re wild. Hey, maybe if you jumped on the off-duty honey wagon, you could afford to put some money into this place. Make it look like somebody important lives here.”

  Jane tossed the keys back to Chris. “No, thanks. I couldn’t juggle all those important responsibilities.” There was a hard sting to her voice. “How are you keeping up with your many side jobs, Chris? Aren’t you overwhelmed with all that information Emily Lawrence is giving you and the other detectives? I saw you on the news tonight. Anybody with half a brain could see that you were lying through your goddamn teeth.”

  “You and your fuckin’ body language,” Chris said in a dismissive tone.

  “Your shifting eyes and lip licking gave you away when you launched into that bullshit about Emily confessing her secrets to detectives. I’m the only one she’s willing to talk to!”

  “You mean ‘whisper.’ What the fuck was all that about anyway? I asked Weyler when he came back up and he just blew me off.” Chris’ demeanor quickly turned ugly. “I’m lead on this case and suddenly you’re getting buddy-buddy with the kid.”

  “If you weren’t such an asshole, I’d tell you what she said—”

  “So, suddenly you and the kid are great buds, huh?”

  “I want nothing to do with your case!” Jane started toward her front door. Chris stood up, preventing her from moving.

  “Hey, Sherlock, maybe I stretched the truth with the media to create a certain amount of fear on the part of the killers. If they think that this kid is spilling her guts to us, they’re gonna get nervous. And if they get nervous enough, they might start making mistakes and talk to some people. And those people might just come talk to us.”

  “What kind of screwed up reasoning is that? They might get nervous? How about if they get so nervous that they track this kid down and kill her so she permanently
stops talking to us! Ever think about that?”

  “‘Us?’ I thought you wanted nothing to do with it!”

  “You know what I mean!” Jane tried to move around Chris but he grabbed her arm.

  “And how would they find her? She’s in protective custody! Even I don’t know where she is half the time!”

  “They didn’t have any trouble finding Amy Stover. And they sure didn’t think twice when they blew her up along with her parents!”

  “Christ! Here we go again with the Stovers! You can’t let that go, can you? Don’t compare the two cases! Amy Stover and her parents were in protective custody until Mr. ‘methamphetamine’ Stover got the bright idea to go get ice cream! He got his family killed because he was ‘tweaking’ and didn’t want to stay put. There’s a load his mother should have swallowed! I don’t have any sympathy for that asshole.”

  Jane looked at Chris, not quite sure what to think. “Jesus, Chris. You saw Amy Stover burning to death in that car just like I did. You saw her eyes. She was pounding her fist on the window and she knew she was going to die—”

  “Jane, they all start to melt together after a while. All the bodies. All the weeping relatives. All the perps that get off. You gotta let it go.”

  “I can’t let it go! It was so simple, Chris. All we had to do was sit outside in that goddamn car and watch out for them—”

  Chris grabbed Jane by her shoulders. “Let it go, Jane!”

  “Stop saying that!” She angrily jerked away from him.

  “You are going over the fucking edge!” Chris said. “I’m worried about you. Weyler is, too.”

  Jane felt exposed by the revelation. “Weyler said that to you?”

  “He thinks you need help. So do I.” Chris let out a deep sigh. “Look, you and I are still partners. What happens to you affects me. And I’m telling you right now, I am not going to watch everything I’ve worked for all these years go into the shitter because you can’t move forward! Think of your career!”

  “I don’t have a career! I have a day-to-day existence that the Department can snuff out like that!” Jane snapped her fingers to punctuate her point.

  “The Stover case is over!”

  “No, Chris!” Jane yelled, waving her bandaged hand in his face. “It’s right here every goddamn day! I look at this and I remember that I couldn’t save Amy Stover. The only way I have a career left is if I solve the Stover murders!”

  A wellspring of rage engulfed Chris. He angrily yanked Jane’s wrist toward his body and spoke with vitriol. “You think your career is fucked? You don’t know what fucked is! I took it in the ass with the Stover case just like you did. But open your eyes, Jane! We caught the fuckin’ golden goose with this Lawrence murder! It’s our opportunity to rise above all the shit and make better than good. But I can’t do it alone. I need you and only you to help me on this case. We gotta work like a team . . . like the old days, right? We put aside our differences . . .” Chris loosened his grasp on Jane’s wrist and pulled her closer to him. “We work the angles . . .” He brushed the palm of his hand against Jane’s breasts. “We get back in sync . . ” Chris seductively slipped his hand between Jane’s legs, stroking her prominent mound. “And maybe it all works out for us . . .” Chris pressed his fleshy mouth against her lips. “Maybe even a promotion . . .”

  Jane was just about to fall under Chris’ spell. She wasn’t sure whether the booze was wearing off or if the stench of his toxic body odor combined with his metallic breath had awakened her. Either way, she pulled back, regarding him with renewed disdain. “That’s what this is about? A promotion!”

  Chris looked at Jane, suddenly all business. “Sergeant Hank Weiting is retiring next month. I want his job.” Chris hesitated a moment, “No . . . I am his job. I’m not some fucking errand boy detective. I’m going to call the shots. I’m going to have the power that I deserve. All I need is the kind of case that makes the Brass sit up and take notice. That’s why I’ve got to nail this Lawrence murder.”

  “Somewhere in there, ‘us’ turned into ‘I.’ You’d cut in line in front of starving Ethiopian children to get a second plate of food.”

  “You do what you gotta do in this world. That’s my new motto. Hey, babe, you know how to play the game. Don’t you?” He winked at her in a knowing way.

  Jane suddenly felt very dirty standing in Chris’ shadow. “Assholes and cream,” she said, heading toward her front door. “Eventually they all rise to the top.”

  “Don’t you fuck up this case for me, Jane!” Chris bellowed as Jane kept walking. “We’ve all got our demons! You’re no exception to that rule!” Jane stopped in her tracks as Chris’ words cut to her core. Chris moved toward his car and swung open the driver’s door. “Take a good look in the mirror, Jane. You and I are two of a kind!”

  Jane turned and stared into the piercing glare of Chris’ headlights. As he sped away from the curb, she wondered what it would feel like to kill him.

  Inside her house, the answering machine light flashed two messages. The first voice was Mike.

  “It’s me. I got home okay. I gotta get some sleep. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  The machine beeped and the second message started.

  “Hello, this message is for Jane Perry. My name is Zoe. I’m the head nurse here at the hospital where your father is staying. I’m in his room right now and he asked me to call you to find out if you could come by tomorrow afternoon. He’d like to discuss some things—”

  The nurse’s voice was interrupted in the background by Dale Perry’s voice, slightly slurred from the stroke. “Give me the phone!” Jane stared at the answering machine as the phone was passed to her father. “Jane! Where the fuck are you? I want you over here tomorrow! Bring your brother!”

  Chapter 8

  Sleepless nights were getting to be a habit for Jane. When she did sleep, it was fitful and splattered with the bloody, charred bodies of the Stover family. Tuesday night was no different. The combative message from her father on the answering machine didn’t abate the insomnia. It was closing in on 2 a.m. when Jane grabbed a pack of cigarettes and walked into the living room. After wearing a tired path around the dining room table while sucking the nicotine out of a cigarette and downing two shots of whiskey, she flicked on the radio.

  “Welcome back to all you travelers between twilight and dawn . . .” Tony Mooney’s voice lay like black velvet across the shadows in the living room. Jane lit another cigarette and poured a third shot of whiskey. “Things are not always what they seem, my friends.” Mooney’s cadence felt comfortable to Jane; like an old friend she hadn’t yet met. “I’m exploring this fascinating idea tonight . . . the interconnectedness of souls. It is a foundation of so many esoteric philosophies and an integral concept explored in the Hindu texts known as the Upanishads . For those of you new to the mystical path, the Upanishads are considered the doctrine that espouses the interconnectedness of separate phenomena. In effect, what appears to be separate, is in fact, intertwined within a giant, infinite web that we experience on many levels of consciousness.” Jane downed the whiskey, waiting for the heat of the alcohol to mend her fractured psyche. Mooney leaned closer to the microphone, his persuasive voice urging naysayers to pay attention. “We truly are all connected to each other. We dip into that collective unconsciousness whether we want to believe in it or not. In doing so, we constantly attract specific souls within that web that call to us like cosmic magnets. And in a heartbeat, we know the stranger’s thoughts and we feel the stranger’s fears. They become us and we become them because, in the end, we are all one . . .” Jane quickly turned off the radio as a cold shiver ran down her spine.

  Morning came too quickly. Jane called Mike at 5:30 Wednesday morning so she could catch him before he headed to his job site. “Take a half day. He wants to see us,” she said to him, “and meet me at Duffy’s no later than 1:00.” Jane wasn’t going to go into the tone of the message or exactly what their father said. Mike would have a hard enough t
ime knowing that in less than nine hours, he’d be face-to-face with his father.

  Duffy’s was a bustling restaurant located in Cherry Creek North. It was where locals mixed with businessmen who mixed with the occasional tourist. The red-topped bar greeted one upon entering the establishment. Nine booths lined up against the pea green walls. Tables with the occasional wobbly fourth leg sat crammed together in the center of the place as the jukebox played eclectic selections that ranged from Adam Ant to Randy Travis. Duffy’s was nearly packed to the gills when she walked in at 12:55. She looked around for Mike, not expecting to see him. As usual, he would be late. If the get-together had anything to do with their father, Mike would always drag his heels. The hostess seated Jane at the far corner booth. She sat down, grabbed a menu and kept one eye on the door. Mike wandered in nearly 15 minutes later, looking about as lost as he did the night before at RooBar. He meandered over to Jane and sank into the booth with about as much energy as a slug.

  “Glad you could make it,” Jane said eyeing him carefully.

  “Sorry,” Mike said under his breath. “Traffic, you know.”

  “Yeah, right. I ordered a beer. You want one?”

  “No. I’ll just get a Coke.”

  “A Coke?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said slightly irritated. “A Coke.”

  Jane regarded her brother with a raised brow. The waitress delivered Jane’s beer. “He’ll have a Coke,” Jane said in a slight mocking tone as she slid the menu to Mike and took a sip of her beer.