In Harm's Way

by Ridley Pearson

  “The homicide in Seattle,” Walt said, a spike of heat flooding him. He’d been looking for a way into a discussion of Boldt, and Wynn had just handed it to him.

  “Impressive.”

  “I’d wanted to talk to you about that.”

  “Me? Why would you want to talk to me about Caroline?” Back on his heels.

  “Was she on the list server?” Walt asked, beginning to draw tangents. “Did she have reason to fear Martel Gale?”

  “Any woman alive has reason to fear Gale. He eats ’em for breakfast. Treats ’em like his personal punching bags. Did Gale know her? Wouldn’t surprise me. He attracted the lookers like flies to shit. But if she was on the server, it didn’t do her any good, did it? The alert came two weeks late. You believe that shit?”

  “There’s a Seattle detective, a Sergeant Boldt, would like a word with you, in private, about Caroline Vetta. He’s suggesting you meet over here, not in Seattle, in order to avoid the press.”

  Wynn coughed a laugh. “Shit, you guys are all a piece of work. You’re telling me I’ve got to get back on the horn with my lawyer?”

  “If you want to involve your lawyer,” Walt said, “I think that might be agreeable. The idea is to keep it out of the press, not to pull an end run on you.”

  “As if the cops care.”

  “This one does, apparently. He can do it in front of all the cameras if you’d prefer.”

  He looked up from the drink. “I don’t see why we can’t do something. Let me make a call and get back to you.”

  “Works for me.” The man drank the liquor like it was water. “Do you have reason to believe Martel Gale is in Sun Valley?”

  “You already asked me that.”

  “And you said you shot at him, not that you knew he was here.”

  “Listen, several women could have testified against him for all I know. Right? And why not Caroline? She could have been one of the girls. Maybe he paid her back.” The way he looked up over the rim of the glass sent a charge through Walt. He needed to make sure Boldt talked to this one.

  “The sooner you can let me know about meeting with the detective, the better. He’s going to fly over specially for this.”

  “Am I supposed to be honored? Let him do what he’s got to do.”

  “I’d like to inspect your weapon,” Walt said.

  “Pity, it’s in the bedroom safe, and hell if I didn’t forget the combination. That’s what I was on the phone to my lawyer about. I knew you fellas would probably want to see it, and I didn’t want to piss anyone off, but it’s in there locked up and I won’t have the combination until tomorrow sometime, when my office is open.”

  “About the time your lawyer’s plane lands?” Walt asked.

  “Cynicism from a county sheriff?”

  “Why make it more difficult than it has to be?”

  “So the lawyers earn their money, I guess.”

  “You can’t go firing a gun in your backyard.”

  “So you said. Gale was out there. I wasn’t taking any chances.”

  Walt heard the man’s name and thought of his wife. It was Gail out there. He’d never be fully free of her, which was the hardest part to adjust to-like one of those stomach microbes from Mexico.

  If he had a killer loose in the valley, he needed to know about it.

  “Could have been a hiker,” Walt said. “Could have been a neighbor.”

  “Gale did Caroline,” Wynn said. “I was next on the list. Trust me. A guy like that settles scores. Football players. Hell, they remember the smallest shit from the previous season, and they make the player pay the next time they face him across a scrimmage line. It’s the way the game’s played. It’s who they are.”

  “In which case you’ve either wounded him or escalated the terms. And your gun’s locked in your safe,” Walt said. “And you forgot the combination.”

  Wynn glanced into the house and back at Walt. “That is problematic,” he said. “Maybe you could leave that smokin’ hot deputy at my front door all night.”

  “Deputy Chalmers is married with five kids. Her husband runs a martial arts school in Hailey. Her eldest is eighteen and has his black belt.”

  Wynn didn’t seem to hear. Walt had lost part of him back at the mention of Boldt.

  “A second weapons violation will result in felony charges. Neither of us wants or needs that. Forgetting the combination to the safe may be a good thing.”

  “I see someone out there, and I’ll shoot first, ask questions later. Take my chances the judge is a sports fan.” He wasn’t threatening, just stating fact. “A guy like that comes after you, you don’t get a second chance. Ask Caroline. Ask the other women he sent to the emergency room. His nickname in the league was Gale Force. Guy handed out concussions like business cards. Ask Trent Green, Kurt Warner. We call those guys a snake bite: all it takes is one hit to kill you.”

  Gail Force. Walt wiped the smirk off his face, wondering why he’d never thought of that one himself.

  “No more guns.”

  “How about a machete or a baseball bat?”

  “Try the phone next time. That’s why we’re here.”

  “To protect and serve. Right, Sheriff?”

  “Right.”

  “So protect me.”

  “Try the yellow pages.”

  “Find Gale, you’ll do us all a favor.”

  “Let me know about setting up the thing with Boldt. The sooner the better.”

  “Two-eighty?” Wynn said as Walt turned to leave.

  The comment spun him around.

  “Your batting average. You’re a switch hitter,” he said. “Calluses.” He indicated Walt’s hands.

  Walt looked down at his palms. “Maybe I’m a gardener,” he said.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Wynn said sarcastically. “Two-eighty,” he repeated confidently.

  “Two eighty-five,” Walt answered. Impressed, but trying not to show it.

  10

  The temptation proved too great and Walt made the turn at the split rail fence at the side of State Highway 75. He drove through the overbuilt log gate and turned left up the hill toward a stand of fir.

  He approached the Engleton guesthouse thinking up an excuse for the visit. He stopped and returned to the Cherokee to retrieve his camera.

  Movement caught his eye and he looked toward the main house in time to see a woman’s silhouette standing in a downstairs window. It was Kira. She held something in her hand across her chest-a baseball bat, he realized.

  Fiona opened the cottage’s door wearing a T-shirt, navy blue sweat-pants, and rubber flip-flops. Her hair was held off her face by a pair of plastic clips.

  “Problems?” she asked.

  “You weren’t answering calls,” he said.

  “No,” she replied.

  “We had a situation: a guy throwing shots in his backyard, believing a client of his was coming after him. I needed some pictures. Took them myself, no big deal.”

  “A broker? I wouldn’t want to be a money manager in this town right now. I can’t imagine the amounts people must have lost.”

  “No, not a money guy, a sports agent. Thought some ex-football jock was creeping around his backyard, and decided it was safer to shoot him than to say hello.” He offered her his camera, making it clear it was a professional, not personal, visit. Wasn’t sure why he felt that so important.

  She staggered back a step, off balance. He caught her by the elbow and held on.

  “You’re saying he saw this… football guy?” she said.

  “No. The whiskey might have done the seeing, I think. It was more likely a neighbor.”

  “Come in,” she said, accepting the camera. “Want me to print these for you?”

  “Please.” He stepped inside.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Sit,” she said.

  “It’s a nice place,” he said.

  “Have you never been here?”

&
nbsp; “No.”

  “How pathetic of me. I can’t believe it’s your first time.”

  It was done up as an English cottage. Leslie Engleton had great taste and deep pockets.

  “I was worried about you,” he said, blurting it out.

  “Me? That’s nice of you. But I’m fine. Just quiet. You know me.” She filled the kettle. “I do that now and then.”

  She got the stove lit under the kettle and sat down in front of a laptop at the breakfast table. She fished around in a box of wires at her feet and connected his camera to the computer.

  “Yours?” he asked, admiring a photo of a black woman on a porch holding a small terrified child.

  “Yes. Just after Katrina.”

  “Powerful.”

  “Thanks. So who was this guy with the gun? This sports guy?”

  “Believe me, you don’t care. Just another guy with a gun who shouldn’t have been drinking. I gave him a warning.”

  She seemed about to say something, but didn’t.

  “No prowlers, I take it?” he asked.

  “For the record, I tried to get Kira to take a trip with me. And that was before the campsite and the hikers. I’d just as soon not be here. For her sake, not mine,” she added emphatically-a little too emphatically, he thought. “She doesn’t need any more scares.”

  He recalled seeing Kira with the bat and made sense of it.

  “Gilly’s a good tracker,” Walt said. “I think we’ll catch this guy.”

  “You’d get no complaint from me. But seriously, did he know it was this football guy? How weird is that?”

  The water was beginning to boil. She returned to the stove.

  “He has a history with this guy.”

  “What kind of history?”

  “Money. You’re certainly the curious one tonight,” he said.

  “I like staying up on your cases, knowing what you’re doing.”

  “Since when?” he asked.

  “Since… I don’t know. I just do. Particularly this prowler at the Berkholders’ or now at this other guy’s.”

  “Could have been the same guy, I suppose, though that’s a long way to travel.”

  “Not so very far.”

  “That, and the Berkholders’ home was empty at the time. With so many homes empty in this community, why hit one where there’s a chance of running into someone?”

  “Better stocked. Fresh food.”

  “So, you’re the detective now?” He waited. “Hey, that was a joke.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “Listen, Gilly and I found a spot with the grass beaten down outside the Berkholders’. This guy scouted the place, and timed it so no one was home. You don’t have anything to worry about here.”

  “Which is why you parked the Jeep at the top of the hill where you can’t miss it?”

  “You noticed that,” he said.

  “Earth to Walt: I have a photographer’s eye. I don’t miss much.”

  “No, you don’t, do you?”

  His photographs had downloaded. She worked the laptop. Walt stood and looked over her shoulder, impressed with how she modified each one.

  “That’s amazing,” he said.

  “You can do anything to a picture. You know that.”

  “You can. Not me.”

  “Is it typical of squatters?” she asked. “Scouting a place like that?”

  “Probably not.”

  “No, I didn’t think so.”

  “Keeping all the lights on is good,” he said. “He’ll stay away, if he hasn’t left the area already.” He paused. “Why do we make everything about the office? I didn’t come here to give you my camera. I thought about that at the last moment.”

  “Then why did you come here?”

  He barely hesitated. All the time spent thinking about this moment, the right situation, and it came down to no thought at all.

  He bent down and kissed her on the lips. Her eyes expressed her surprise, but her lips, warm and sweet with wine, pressed to his more tightly, and then her eyes shut and her hands came around his head, and her body shook as if caught in guttural laughter.

  He pulled back and she held on to him saying, “Don’t… don’t you dare stop,” kissing him hungrily.

  Her chair went over backward, Walt throwing his arms around her and saving her from the fall, the weight and warmth of her pressed to him as he eased her to the floor, her hair spread like a fan on the throw rug. She was laughing, in fact, like a child opening an unexpected, yet long anticipated, gift. Their bodies touching, hands beginning to explore and delight, she worked her fingers past his ears, holding his face an inch away from her own and managed to growl, “Why… so… long?”

  Walt answered with smiling eyes, his fingers trapping a tear as it spilled down her cheek.

  “Do we dare do this?” he whispered.

  “You’re damn right we do,” she answered breathlessly, tugging the shirttail from his waistband and running her hands up his back, delivering chills.

  Time arrested all thought. Walt fell away from himself, from his planning and predetermining. They knocked a vase off the coffee table. She laughed harder, and slapped his hand as he reached to right it, grabbing and guiding his fingers lower on her. Scared and elated, both present and absent, he felt her respond to his touch, her legs parting, her warmth overwhelming. The scent of her, sacred and mysterious, engulfed him, intoxicating. Dizzy with her, overwhelmed, underprepared, and fearing inexperience, he fell victim to her, suddenly finding himself past any point of reason or thought, driven by human hunger and a forceful need to join her.

  When it was over, when the flush beneath her collarbone flared and her bare flesh rippled with gooseflesh, she opened her eyes to the ceiling and smiled devilishly, chortling to herself.

  “Oh my God,” she said. She took him by the hair and tugged and laughed privately again and said more softly, “Oh my God.”

  He answered not with words-couldn’t find any; they’d all deserted him-but with a squeeze of her hand and by lying next to her and hooking his ankle over hers so that their feet embraced as their bodies just had. They stared at the ceiling together.

  “You must promise me,” she said, “that you’ll never pretend that didn’t happen. It’s all I ask.”

  “Promise.”

  Five minutes passed into ten. She offered little touches as if making sure he was still there beside her, as if reassuring herself. “There are moments you never forget,” she said. “This is one of them.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’m not saying it has to happen again. I’m not saying it won’t. I’m just saying… it had to happen now and it did and we can’t have any regrets.”

  “No. None. Not from me,” he said.

  “You don’t have to court me, but you mustn’t ignore me.”

  “Never. Not possible.”

  “And I promise to keep it professional in public. I know that can’t be easy for you. I don’t want you worrying about that.”

  “I’m not even thinking right now. I’m certainly not worrying about anything, except disappointing you, because I never want to, I don’t intend to. If I could wrap up all the happiness in the world into a package, if I could give you that, I would. Whatever the word means to you, whatever it is you want-I would give you that.”

  “Then you’d wrap up yourself,” she said, her fingers absentmindedly finding his face and the tips of her fingers searching his expression like a blind person’s. Finding a grin, they pulled away, satisfied.

  “I know you can’t stay,” she said, “but I want you to, you’re welcome to as long as you can. I’d like to fall asleep in your arms. I’d like to never wake up.”

  “I’d like to take a shower with you,” he said. “To soap you all over.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  Later, he could hear the water still bubbling in the kettle, the chorus of night creatures-crickets, frogs, and things that go chirp in the dark; beneath it all he
heard the steady, comforting sound of a cat purring and his eye finally lighted on the tabby balled up by a pillow on the loveseat, so still he’d not seen it.

  “What’s its name?” he asked.

  “Her,” she said. “Angel.”

  He nodded.

  “It never hurts to have an angel around,” she said. She wore a terry-cloth robe pulled tightly around her slim waist as she fixed them both tea and brought him a cup. He wore his uniform again, its shoulders damp from his wet hair.

  She sat cross-legged on the couch.

  He stared at her. The cat got up and climbed into her lap.

  “I like this about you,” he said.

  “The silence?”

  “Umm.”

  “Me, too.” She hesitated. “You were like an eighteen-year-old tonight.”

  “Had a few, have you?”

  She threw her spoon at him and hit him in the chest. He caught it as it fell and placed it on the coffee table.

  “Don’t overthink this,” she said.

  “It’s tempting,” he said, “but no. I don’t plan to.”

  “You’re welcome here anytime. Standing invitation.”

  “Standing, as in the shower?”

  “Don’t get fresh.”

  “Please?”

  She laughed.

  “I’ve heard you laugh more tonight than in two years of knowing you.”

  “Maybe you haven’t known me.”

  “Maybe not,” he admitted. “Although in the Biblical sense-”

  “Shut up! If I had another spoon to throw, I would.”

  He passed her the spoon. Her eyes shone brightly as she teased a second throw, and she set it down.

  He sighed contentedly.

  They stared.

  “I want you to know,” she said, “I’m serious about this. But it doesn’t mean you have to be. This is your free pass out of jail. Tonight. Right now. No harm. No foul. But if you don’t take the pass, if you stay in jail and decide to roll the dice, that’s something else entirely.”

  “Understood,” he said. He didn’t want a pass. He wanted to sleep here. He wanted to tell her he’d dreamed of this, fantasized about it and that it had exceeded all he’d imagined because one couldn’t imagine how at ease he felt with her. He felt transformed. If not for the kids, he’d run away with her if she’d have him, and it struck him that she would have him, that she’d have agreed, and he nearly laughed.