by Cari Hunter
“Hey.” Lyssa had three bottles of beer in her hands. She offered one to Sarah and set the second bottle in the cooler. “Save this for Alex when she’s finished. She’ll probably need it as a consolation prize,” she said, sitting on the edge of the blanket.
Sarah shuffled over to make a bigger gap for her. “Thanks. You off duty today?”
“Hell, yes. I’m back in on Friday night.” Lyssa snagged a piece of chicken from Sarah’s plate and looked at her expectantly. “So, you heard yet? You must have heard by now.”
Never sure what Lyssa’s shift pattern was, Sarah hadn’t wanted to risk disturbing her after a night shift by calling her. As a result, she had been sitting on her good news for three days. She smiled, feeling shy all over again. “I got ninety-six percent,” she said.
For a second, Lyssa just stared. Then she gave a whoop of delight and threw her arms around Sarah. “That’s brilliant! You’re brilliant!” She kissed her sloppily on the cheek. “Hey, I’m brilliant!”
“You are brilliant,” Sarah said. “Couldn’t have done it without you.” Her arm was still around Lyssa and she hugged her close. “I owe you, massively.”
Since meeting Sarah on an emergency call four months ago, Lyssa had been helping to coach her through her EMT course, and the extra tuition, in addition to Sarah’s college course in Ruby, had paid dividends.
“Onward and upward.” Lyssa clinked her beer against Sarah’s.
“Definitely.”
They sat side by side, cheering on the teams laboring in the contest. For the first time in five years, the police seemed to have the upper hand, and the handkerchief tied around the center of the rope was inching inexorably in their direction. A minute later, the Avery team capitulated en masse and, without warning, stumbled and fell gracelessly into the shallow water. Sarah clambered to her feet, pulling Lyssa up beside her, and waved at Alex.
As the noise and fuss subsided, Lyssa sat back down, but Sarah turned, suddenly uncomfortable for some reason. A few feet behind her, Margot St. Clare was sitting on a deck chair. She had evidently been watching Sarah and Lyssa for a while, and her face twisted into a scowl of distaste when Sarah caught her eye. It was Sarah who looked away first, back toward the lake, where she saw Alex diving into the water with the rest of her team. Trying to push her unease aside, Sarah retook her place on the blanket, but she could still sense Margot’s gaze fixed on her. She cradled the beer that Lyssa gave her but shook her head at the plate of food; she had completely lost her appetite.
*
“Here, drink this and tell me what’s bugging you.”
Sarah obediently cradled the mug and sipped from it slowly. The tea was exactly how she liked it: strong, piping hot, milk no sugar. As she drank, Alex reached across and rested a hand on her forehead.
“Not post-picnic heatstroke, then,” she murmured.
Sarah looked up at her. “I’m okay.”
“Mmhm.” Alex sat on the bed. “You’re far too quiet and you’re not eating.” She squeezed Sarah’s hand. “If it was just the not talking, I wouldn’t be so worried.”
Sarah gave her a weak smile. “It’s stupid, really. You’ll think I’m being stupid.”
“Try me.”
“Margot St. Clare…” The name was barely past her lips when she was interrupted by Alex’s theatrical groan. “See, I told you you’d think I was stupid.” She pulled the sheets up to hide her face, so that she heard Alex’s apology from beyond a layer of cotton.
“I’m sorry. You can tell me. I won’t say a word until you’ve finished. I promise.”
Peeking out, Sarah grimaced and then spoke quickly. “At the picnic, I told Lyssa about my exam, and she hugged and kissed me, and Margot obviously saw it and gave us both a really nasty look.” The words sounded completely ridiculous as soon as they were out in the open, and when she saw a muscle at the corner of Alex’s jaw begin to twitch, she put her out of her misery by laughing first. “I feel like such a fucking numpty.”
“Oh, honey.” Alex reached up and tousled her hair. “Margot hates pretty much everyone and everything. I think she once put a hex on Quinn for growing an ungodly moustache.”
“She did not.”
“Or maybe it was unmanly. Y’know, a bit too ‘Village People.’ I forget,” Alex said. They were still giggling when the phone rang. “Speak of the devil,” she muttered when she saw the number on the screen. For a moment, Sarah felt sure it was Margot calling to damn them from afar, but then Alex mouthed “Quinn” and picked up the handset.
“Hello?”
Whatever Quinn told her made her sit up a little straighter. Sarah set her mug down, watching Alex’s face for clues, but Alex gave nothing away until she’d ended the call with a crisp, “Yes, sir.”
“Dare I ask?” Sarah tried to keep her voice light, but she could hear the tension creep into the question.
Alex’s eyes were bright with excitement when she turned around. “That warehouse in Ruby, the one we’ve had under surveillance?”
Sarah nodded; it was the biggest operation Alex had been involved with since starting with the Avery PD. Meth, cocaine, and prescription drugs were all finding their way into the hands of dealers via a large, nondescript warehouse in one of Ruby’s less salubrious districts.
“Quinn’s planning a raid on it tomorrow night,” Alex said.
“But you’re on an early tomorrow.” As soon as Sarah spoke, she knew what the phone call had been about. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” Alex dragged the word out and Sarah saw the conflict flit across her face; she wanted to be involved just as desperately as she didn’t want Sarah to worry. “He asked me to swap my shift.”
Sarah cupped a hand beneath Alex’s chin and raised her head until their eyes met. “You be careful,” she said.
Alex nodded. “Will you be okay?”
It took a lot for Sarah not to blink, but she managed it. “I’ll be fine.”
*
The trail beneath Sarah’s sneakers was carpeted with pine needles and other detritus from the forest surrounding her. The cushioned layer was hard work to run on, but the route was lovely, looping through the land they had bought with the cabin and marking the halfway point of her jog by suddenly leaving the trees and breaking out onto a beautiful mile-long stretch at the side of the lake.
A breeze hit her flushed cheeks as she followed the path to the right and continued along the shoreline. She could feel the sweat cooling on her back, and a slight ache where the old fracture in her ankle had knitted together in imperfect alignment. A series of splashes told her that Tilly had decided to interrupt her own run with a swim, and high in the branches something brightly colored sang as they passed.
Sarah welcomed the myriad distractions; they stopped her from looking at her watch or thinking about how near the sun was to the horizon. She planned to finish her run, have a long bath, and then go to bed. She would not sit up all night, monitoring the hours as they ticked by and waiting for Alex to call; she refused to allow herself to fall into that kind of pattern. Alex was a cop. When they had gotten back from their travels and the job opportunity had arisen, Sarah had actively encouraged her to go back to the force. They both knew and accepted the potential risks that the job entailed, and Avery wasn’t exactly a hotbed of violent crime, which made tonight’s raid the exception rather than the norm.
Her feet pounding rhythmically against the rough path, Sarah nodded in appreciation at her inner monologue’s sensible tone. She whistled for Tilly just as the path hooked back around into the twilight of the forest. The change in light was so abrupt that she had to wait for her vision to adjust before she picked up her pace again. The sweat that had chilled against her skin began to run freely as the breeze disappeared, and she wiped a damp hand across her forehead. She looked ahead into the gloom, the fears she had managed to quell so effectively beginning to inch back into her thoughts. She knew how easy it was to be rational in the daylight, but painful experience had taught her that t
he hours in the depths of the night were the ones to dread.
*
Still rubbing her hair dry, Sarah slipped and skidded barefoot across the wooden floor of the bedroom. She launched her towel onto the bed and took hold of her pager, silencing its shrieking with the press of a button and picking up the phone to dial through to dispatch. Sod’s law, she thought, as the number slowly connected and all hopes for an early night disappeared. So much for best laid plans.
“Hey, Esther.”
“Sarah. Thank goodness.” Esther sounded incredibly stressed. Sarah, immediately thinking of the raid, glanced at her watch, even though she was certain that the teams weren’t scheduled to move on the warehouse for at least another hour. “It’s Jo Bair,” Esther continued, putting her mind at rest on that score at least. “She’s in labor and bleeding.”
Sarah propped the phone between her ear and shoulder and started to get dressed. “ETA on the ambulance?” she asked.
“That’s the problem. Frances Stokes had a heart attack not twenty minutes since. The ambulance only just left for Cary.”
“Shit.” She stopped dead, her keys in her hand. “Esther, I don’t—”
“I know,” Esther said softly. “I got hold of a midwife in Tawny, but she’s a good hour out and all the police resources are tied up with the raid so I can’t get her there any quicker. I’m afraid you’re it, honey.”
Sarah nodded, even though Esther couldn’t see her. “Don’t say anything to Alex. She’s going to have enough on her mind.”
“Not a word.”
“Thanks, Esther.” She picked up her bag. “Give me the address.”
*
The briefing room at the station house was two storage closets that Bill Quinn had long ago knocked through with a sledgehammer and a fair amount of devil-may-care enthusiasm. As such, it was cramped, windowless, and—with ten people crammed inside—verging on airless. Its back wall was dominated by a whiteboard on which Quinn had sketched the layout of the warehouse. A series of scribbles and numbers delineated the tactics he intended to put into play during the raid.
Alex watched the progress of her designated number as blue Sharpie arrows made it sweep from the rear to cut off any fleeing perpetrators and then directed it to search the offices clustered at the left of the building. Scott Emerson and Larry Tobin—one of the reserve officers, who at twenty-eight was becoming increasingly desperate to be employed on a full-time basis—would be the other members of her small team.
While Sarah had been teaching at the lake, Alex had spent the day studying the blueprints of the warehouse, cleaning and checking her service weapon, and reading through the rap sheets of the men whose comings and goings had been logged over the past months. She recognized three of them, having documented their activities in detail during several night shifts tasked to surveillance duty, and the remainder seemed to fall into the same career pattern: minor criminality, then a steady progression toward more violent, riskier schemes that promised bigger payoffs. They reminded her of Nathan Merrick, the ambitious crook whose own bid for glory had seen him link up as a supplier to Nicholas Deakin’s hate organization. Merrick’s reward had been an ignominious death in a puddle of filth at the side of a small campfire in the Cascades. It was the only time that Alex had ever shot anyone, and he was the only man she had ever killed outright.
“Alex?”
She jumped as a hand touched her arm. People were beginning to leave the small room, but she had no idea at what point the briefing had concluded.
Larry Tobin withdrew his hand with a sheepish grin. “Sorry. I just…” He gestured toward one of the straps on his Kevlar vest. “Little help?”
“Yeah.” The word came out hoarsely and she cleared her throat. “Sure, hold still.” She adjusted the strap so that the vest sat snugly in position. “Better?”
Tobin struck a few exaggerated poses she vaguely recognized from one of her training manuals, and she wished she could request a change of team. Her own vest was still in her locker; it was another fifty minutes before they were due to leave the station.
“That’s great, thanks,” he said. “Can’t believe I get to be a part of this.” His grin stretched almost from ear to ear and he was fairly bouncing on the spot.
She bit back the obvious response, clapped him on the shoulder, and wondered whether Esther was busy. Esther always had a stash of really good coffee, and something told Alex that she was going to need a lot of it.
*
The Bair house was ablaze with light, as if sending up a desperate signal for someone to come and help its occupants. Sarah grabbed her response bag and the obstetrics pack that Lyssa had managed to sneak out of stores for her three months ago. They had spent an afternoon going through the contents of the pack as Lyssa regaled her with home birth horror stories and anecdotes. Watching Lyssa squeeze a cantaloupe through an inflated water wing had been the sum of her obstetrics training to date.
Her legs were trembling as she got out of the Jeep. Even from the driveway, she could hear Jo Bair screaming in pain. That was not a good sign; she clearly remembered Lyssa making that point. “If you can hear them yelling from the street,” Lyssa had said with a huge grin, “get your catching mitt on.”
“Fuck,” Sarah whispered. She ran up the driveway and pounded on the door. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Behind the glass paneling, Syd Bair was fumbling with his keys. He dropped the entire set before trying the wrong key twice. By the time he opened the door, he was close to tears.
“Oh God, where’s the ambulance?” He looked over her shoulder, as if willing one to appear. Somewhere off to the right, Jo shouted for him.
“It’s not going to be here for a while,” Sarah said, somehow managing to keep her voice level. “There’s a midwife on her way, but she’s coming from Tawny.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.
The question was so pointed that she almost told him the truth.
“I’ve had training.” She deliberately chose not to expand on that, but ushered him ahead of her toward the bedroom. At the door, she caught hold of his sleeve. “I’ll need your help, Syd, so you’re going to have to stay calm.”
He ran a hand through his hair, then nodded once and pushed the door open. “Honey, Sarah’s here,” he said, kneeling by the side of the bed and taking hold of Jo’s hand.
Jo wearily raised her head from the pillows and gave Sarah a little wave.
“Thought first ones were supposed to take forever,” she said between heavy breaths.
“Got caught a bit short, did you?” Sarah smiled as Jo rolled her eyes in agreement. She set her bag down and pulled on a pair of gloves, her damp palms making them cling and wrinkle. Even with her lack of experience, one glance at Jo told her that the birth was imminent. The bed was soaked with bloodstained, straw-colored fluid and, as another contraction started, she could see the bulge and retreat of the baby’s head.
“Okay,” she said. “I think you’re having a baby.”
Jo nodded wryly. Then she let out a yelp and started to strain.
“What can I do?” Syd asked, his eyes flickering with fear.
Sarah tried to think logically. “Towels. See if we can get Jo onto a dry spot, and we’ll keep some warm ones for the baby. Jo, how far apart are your contractions?” She had her answer almost immediately as Jo groaned through the onset of another one. “Okay, so, less than a minute.”
She opened the maternity pack, arranging clamps and scissors, a small bulb syringe for suction, and a bowl that Lyssa had said was about as much use for catching a placenta as a blind man with no hands. Syd passed her a multicolored pile of towels, having apparently pulled everything he could find from the bathroom closet.
“Lovely,” Sarah said, surprised by how calm she felt. “Right, Jo, let’s shuffle you this way a little.”
Between the two of them, she and Syd managed to move Jo off the sodden bedding and onto the thickest of the towels.
“How’re you doing?” Sarah asked gently, as a contraction faded.
“Bit scared,” Jo said. “Not quite how we planned it.”
“No?” Sarah held a glass of juice for her to sip from. “Had you fancied a water birth or something?”
Jo gave a harsh laugh. “No, I’d fancied an epidural! Oh fuck…” The pain hit her without warning, and she moaned, bearing down until her face turned an alarming shade of red.
“Go, go, go, you’re doing great,” Syd chanted.
“Squeeze his hand,” Sarah said. “He got you into this mess.” She licked her dry lips, gauging the progress of the delivery. “Jo, you’re crowning. I need you to pant through this one.”
“Pant?” Jo sounded incredulous. “I want it out!”
“It’s coming out, sweetheart.” Sarah fervently hoped that she was remembering correctly. “But I don’t want you to tear, so pant, okay?”
Jo was already panting, the pain making her rock back and forward.
“Good, that’s brilliant.” Sarah watched as the baby’s head slowly emerged and then turned. Its eyes were closed, its face swollen and purple beneath the mess of birthing fluids, and Sarah swore quietly when she saw the loop of umbilical cord coiled around its neck.
“Jo.” She patted Jo’s thigh and tried to keep the urgency out of her voice. “You need to give me a really good push.”
Syd had seen the cord too. He looked at Sarah, his mouth opening to ask a question, but she cut him off with a sharp shake of her head as Jo began to bear down again.
“Keep going, keep going,” Sarah said. She tried to remove the cord, but there was no slack for her to work with; there was no way she could loosen it until the baby was completely born. Jo was pushing for all she was worth, and she delivered the baby in a rush of blood and black liquid.
“Jesus Christ.” She fell back onto the pillows, leaving Sarah with her hands full of a slippery, silent baby.
