by Carl Hamlin
McKormack let out an exaggerated moan and rose from his chair. He turned, shook his head and left.
An hour later, a deputy came to Kara’s office and handed her a sheet of paper. “This is a photo of the car that picked Harlow up after he was released. He’s being followed, and we’ll let you know if he starts driving something. Unfortunately, he got his license renewed just before his arrest. So we can’t get a charge there if he does drive. Of course, anything we see him driving, we’ll do a check to see if he has insurance.”
Kara nodded. “Is the surveillance obvious or covert?”
“Very obvious. We want him to know he’ll be blamed for anything that happens around him.”
“Thanks, Wally.”
“And….there’ll be extra patrols past your house.”
“Wally…..I appreciate that. But I don’t want to spook the neighbors.”
“Do your neighbors know what you do?”
“Uhmm…..some do.”
The deputy turned to leave. “We’re watching.”
Kara was on her way home in the late afternoon. The days had already grown short, as autumn had settled in enough to make the trees change color. She was still rattled that a man who considered himself to be her nemesis had been freed, and did not relax much as she drove home.
She pulled into her driveway, but thirty feet from the door, she pressed the button on her remote opener and switched her headlights to the bright setting.
She hesitated and looked at the garage interior the beset she cold from the car. She could see no one around, but as she drove slowly into the garage, she pulled the revolver from her holster and fingered the trigger.
Her own car, a tiny Mini Cooper convertible did not take up much room on the other half of the garage, and would provide little cover for anyone waiting in ambush. As another precaution, she had mounted a large mirror on the wall that would have revealed anyone attempting to hide there.
Once inside the garage, she quickly scrambled out of the car and kept the gun in firing position. Finally satisfied that she was alone, she pressed the button that lowered the door, and walked into the kitchen.
She still had the gun at ready as she punched numbers on the alarm system. This time, she reset it. Kara walked toward the living room, but did not immediately walk to the bedroom and remove the gun and holster as she typically did.
No one, not even Roger, knew just how well armed this attractive and feminine woman was. There was another weapon that she kept nearby on those rare times at home that she felt a sense of risk. She went to her hallway closet and took a metal box from the shelf. Kara dialed the combination lock, and the lid popped loose. Inside was her Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum revolver. With its longer barrel, Kara achieved the most accuracy, especially when distance was involved with the handgun. She replaced the .38 with the larger gun with its special holster. It would ride at her hip for the evening.
It was simply not a possibility that Kara would stop her morning runs. She had made it through the night without any messages that Dan Harlow was heading toward her neighborhood.
The one concession she would make on this Thursday morning run was that she would tolerate a little extra weight on her person. Before she left the house, she dug a waist pack from her closet, and found that the large Smith and Wesson just fit inside. She did not zip the pouch closed, confident that it was too heavy to fall out from her motions as she ran.
She went out the door and locked it behind her. She bounded down the several steps to the sidewalk and was off on her usual running route. When she reached the first intersection, she made another concession to the freedom of Dan Harlow. She decided to go right instead of left.
She began running up a street she knew well, but rarely ran. She did not know any of these three neighbors who were out and about at 5:15 A.M.. For all practical purposes, the city of Blanton and its ninety thousand residents was still asleep.
She came to the end of the block and took a left down yet another street she had not run. However, she had been here before. On one of her rare weekend afternoons of babysitting Michael, she had walked him in the stroller past these old homes with the grand trees and large lawns.
Susan, her son-in-law Kenny and little Michael lived just ten miles away. However, when it came to attempting to synchronize their lives to allow for time together, they may as well have lived in Alaska.
It was a sudden rush of emotion that came over Kara like a wave. Her mind began bouncing back and forth between the recent memory of holding the toddler in her arms, and the knowledge that there was a particularly nasty man on the loose who would like to do her harm. These two parts of her life seemed to collide in her consciousness, and Kara began to cry.
Kara had cried three times in the past forty years. The first was when Susan and Kenny were marred. The next time was when Susan had come to her many years ago upset that she could not bear children. The last time was just over two years ago when she drove Susan and Kenny to the attorney’s office to receive the baby they were adopting. That was Michael.
She was disappointed in herself as the tears flowed. She had often dealt with those harsh and dangerous men who were simply a part of her chosen field of work. However, most of the time her involvement was on the fringe of their situations. This was different.
Kara was definitely out of sorts when she arrived at the office. The rest of the staff was not accustomed to seeing her without, if not a smile on her face, at least an aura of a neutral mood.
For the entire day, she struggled to be pleasant to all around her. She needed to stay grounded, because it was best that she clear out as many reports, purchasing requests and other minutia of management as possible before going home. She knew that the next day, a Friday, would be largely allotted to home visits and residence verifications for her portion of the caseload.
The stack of papers on her desk seemed to take on a life of its own. On this day, the sheets of paper possessed a stubborn refusal to willingly surrender. It was a battle of wills between Kara and the document stack, but she finally prevailed and checked out for the day.
She once again drove home in dim light. She felt immense guilt as she stopped for some fast food, knowing she should damned well have a salad. On a day that started out as a downer, she had defeated the bureaucratic enemy that was her desk, and was feeling triumphant.
Her hundreds of calories in the warm bag at her side, she once again stopped at the end of the driveway and went through her cautious routine. The interior lights glared, and the high beams on the Ford added to the light show.
She pulled the .38 from her holster and sat it next to the sinful meal. She drove carefully in, glancing back and forth all the while.
After going into the home and resetting the alarms, Kara felt a sigh of relief. It was a rare treat of decadence for her to sit down behind a TV tray, turn on the news and wolf down a sugary soda, a large double-decker hamburger and a large order of French fries. It was not good for her or her typical behavior. However, the orgy of calories helped to lift her spirits.
She began to look forward to being with Roger the next night, and spending much of the weekend with him. Just as she was finishing her last French fry, her phone chimed, indicating a text message. It was from the Sherriff’s Department, telling her that a brother of Harlow’s had picked him up at the sister’s home where he was staying and was tracked to a route going out of town. The surveillance would continue, but it was all clear for now.
Further buoyed, she decided to take a long, leisurely shower to cap off her recovery from a couple of trying days. The mood hit her: she went to her stereo and dug a Jimi Hendrix CD from the stack. She knew the neighbors in the other half of the brownstone were traveling, so she turned up the volume control. When she heard the opening guitar riffs to “All Along the Watchtower”, she began to dance as she had in her youth when teenage boys lusted after her. She slowly stripped off her clothes to the pulsing beat of the music and tossed them onto her sofa. S
he danced in the nude to the bathroom, still swaying to the beat as she turned on the water and allowed the hot streams to melt any remaining tension away.
Kara slept more soundly than she had during the previous two nights. She had packed her suitcase before going to bed, so she got up and dressed and ate breakfast. It was her day of home visits, so she skipped showering, as she knew that at the end of the day, she would only feel the need to shower again.
She was eager for the day to commence, so that it could end. She headed for the garage, and this time did not go through her threat alert routine. She placed her luggage in the Mini Cooper, so that it would be ready for her to drive away after work, taking her to her weekend with Roger.
She was in jeans and a sweater, as she preferred to not wear her best business wear that needed to be dry cleaned when doing visits in some of the seedier residences in Park County, especially in certain parts of Blanton. Inside the Ford, she patted her sidearm, and then pressed the button to raise the door. Out of habit, she was careful to look around as she exited.
Her mind was distracted as she drove to the office. She did not look forward to the home visits. One of the reasons she had sought promotion was to put that part of the job behind her.
She had been bitten by dogs, slipped on icy, uneven steps and porches, and been met at the door by handguns. The eight year-old son of one of her probationers had sneaked up behind her with a slingshot loaded with a pebble, and sent her away with a sore, red spot on her backside.
The people on her caseload, mostly women, led troubled lives. The homes were typically disheveled and dirty. However, what disturbed her most were the lives that were spent stepping from one problem to another. Some had become involved with drugs; others had been either willing or captive participants in the misdeeds of the men in their lives. A few had stolen money from employers. One common theme was lives that suffered from self-inflicted wounds.
Kara knew all about self-inflicted wounds. Her life was forever changed by that unsatisfying tryst on her boyfriend’s sofa when she was not yet seventeen.
There had been negligible child support, and a total lack of contact with Susan’s father. As Kara thought of some of the women she had on her caseload, she could not ignore the high percentage that had also been teen mothers. She knew that she was more fortunate than most of them had been, in that her parents were people of means.
Sitting at her desk and looking over her list of visits for the day, she decided to send e-mail to McKormack, who was already in a meeting expected to last for most of the morning. She informed him of her intention to go straight home after her last visit, and advised him that she would be out of town for the weekend. Recently, he had come to expect that message and was happy for Kara. He knew Roger rather well, and had several times made it known to Kara that he was convinced that she had found a good man.
Although her department covered the entirety of Park County, the majority of Kara’s caseload resided in a ten square block section of Blanton. She would spend much of her day there.
She drove into the south side of Blanton, an area where drug dealing was rampant. She knew the area like the back of her hand and she drove to the apartment complex of her first visit by memory.
Her first appointment was with a woman in her mid-twenties who was on probation for drug possession. She had failed to report to the probation office for a mandatory drug test. Kara had sent a certified letter two weeks ago to set the appointment for the home visit, but the letter had been returned for lack of signature. Another letter was sent by regular mail, and it had not come back.
It was no surprise to Kara that no one answered the door to the second-floor apartment. She went to the neighboring door and knocked. When it opened, she flashed her badge, but the neighbor claimed to have not seen the resident for some days.
Kara went back to her car, and began making an entry on her laptop computer. This would mean that on Monday, she would have to fill out another arrest warrant.
To her surprise, the next three probationers were at home. Two were men who responded to her questions in monosyllabic answers whenever possible. All their longer answers were obviously crafted to tell her what they thought she wanted to hear.
She was especially relieved that the second of these visits had gone off without incident. That fellow had once made a pass at her. He was far from the only one to get fresh with her, but he was the most serious. However, Kara had a special, steely frown she had perfected for such occasions, and it always worked.
She glanced at her watch and decided that she was on time to keep the last appointment before lunch. The woman was outside playing with her toddler when Kara pulled up. She was one of the few on Kara’s caseload who was typically happy to see her.
The nineteen-year-old woman had a three-year-old daughter. It seemed that Kara’s conversations with this young mother always ended up in a you-can-do-it-too pep talk. Her case was one that haunted Kara, and always left her unsettled. She was a bright young woman, who had also come from a solid family. They were just too much alike.
Hoping to end her day a little early, Kara skipped lunch and drove out to the edge of the county to her most remote client. She had called ahead to make sure the woman would be home, as she was originally scheduled to be the last on the list.
She remembered this residence, and she reached in her purse and had her mace canister handy as she pulled up in the driveway. The last time she was here, a German shepherd had nipped her in the same spot where the little boy had shot her with the slingshot.
The woman she had come to see lived with her parents in the rundown house that had once been part of a farm, but the land around it had been sold off. No dog appeared as she got out of the car, but she kept the mace at ready.
The woman’s mother came to the door, and called out that the dog was no longer there. She let Kara in and pointed to the living room where the client sat in silence. She was much thinner than the last time they had met, and it had not been that long ago.
The mother eavesdropped, as Kara heard the largely unresponsive woman attempt to answer questions by giving no information. Kara knew that she was scheduled for a drug test the following week, and was certain of the outcome. As Kara went to leave, the mother whispered to her, “I don’t know where she’s getting the stuff.”
It was late afternoon, and Kara was back in Blanton and pulling up at the curb in front of a duplex to meet her last appointment for the day. She walked up to the front door, and noticed that in spite of the cool temperature, the inside door was standing open. As she approached, a toddler came to the door crying, and leaned against the screen of the storm door.
Kara leaned down. “It’s okay. Is your mommy home?
The child stopped crying but said, “Mommy blood.” That was when she noticed blood on the child’s arm and leg.
Kara flipped open her phone and called for officers. She drew her gun, opened the door and gently pulled the child out. She took her jacket off and put it around the little girl, shielded her and hoped that the officers would not be too long in getting there.
Two minutes later, she could hear an approaching siren, and to her relief the squad car pulled up in front of the house. In the distance, she could hear another siren.
The first officer who arrived went to a side window to look in, but could see nothing. The second officer arrived, and he motioned to the first to go to the back of the house. Just as the first officer opened the front door and entered the home in a crouch, an ambulance arrived.
Kara holstered her gun, lifted the girl and carried her to the ambulance so that a paramedic could check her over, then returned to the area outside the house. She began to draw the gun once again, when she heard the shout of “All clear”. The first officer came to the door and shouted for the paramedics. A second ambulance arrived, and Kara stepped into the back of the vehicle where the little girl was crying again and tried to help the paramedic keep her calm.
In the ambulance, Kara
was able to hear the radio transmissions. The girl’s mother had fallen from a step stool while trying to get something from a closet shelf. She had lost her balance and struck her head on a drawer pull. Not only had she been rendered unconscious, she had suffered a scalp wound sufficient to pour out enough blood to make a large pool. The bleeding was still severe as the medics got to her.
The woman was brought out on a gurney, but conscious. One of the officers and Kara stayed with the little girl until a child welfare worker could arrive and begin making calls to the phone number the woozy woman had given to contact her mother so that the child could stay with family for the night.
Rather than enjoying an early breakout for the weekend, Kara had to, instead, go back to the office and fill out a report in the incident, and an extra report to explain the circumstances under which she had drawn her gun.
She called Roger to tell him of the delay. She was not upset, but felt mellow and almost cheerful that a scheduled home visit may have prevented much more severe blood lose, or worse. Any irritation she might have felt was shoved aside, knowing that the little girl had not lost her mother.
She had expected to simply stay at his apartment for the night. However, he surprised her by telling her that he had reserved a room at a hotel on the outskirts of the city, an elegant place. Further, he informed her that he had arranged for a room with a whirlpool tub in the bedroom.
She drove home thankful that a tragedy had been averted. The injured woman had little going for her, but she was the mother of a precious little girl. It was all that really mattered.
By the time Kara arrived at Roger’s apartment building, she was ready to leave the week far behind her. She pulled up along the curb to park, but Roger was waiting to pull out so her car would be in his space in the tenant lot. She stepped out of the tiny car, took her suitcase out and rushed to kiss him as he grabbed the suitcase to carry it for her. There was another, much small bag that she carried over her shoulder. It felt like it had been ages since they had been together, although it was only actually a week. A long week.
