Denny's Law

by Elizabeth Gunn

  ‘Coincidence.’

  ‘Will—’

  ‘It does happen, Sarah. You’re not immune to the law of averages.’

  The phone rang. It was Delaney, making one last call after a storm of phoning that changed a week’s schedules around this sudden surge of work in Sarah’s yard.

  She put the kitchen phone on speaker so Will could hear. ‘Boss, you got Banjo’s report?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I know Banjo’s never wrong, but … what do you think?’

  ‘I think we need to find the man who shot your car,’ Delaney said. ‘Beyond that I don’t have an opinion yet. We need more evidence. Meanwhile, the chief says we need to move you and your family to a safe house for the weekend.’

  ‘A safe house?’ Three days of sitting aimlessly in some dismal repo in a suburb? ‘Come on, boss, two experienced cops in one house in a quiet neighborhood? Give us one man walking the perimeter and we can be plenty safe right here.’

  But Delaney was the department’s man this afternoon, not available for a friendly chat. He didn’t even acknowledge her objections except to say, ‘If the chief says you go, you go.’

  She listened in wretched silence as he laid down the orders. ‘We’re looking for a two-bedroom suite with a sitting room, in a downtown hotel, at least five stories up. We can guarantee safety there with one man in the suite and two in the lobby. There are not many rooms like that to choose from in Tucson and we’re not going to select it over the phone, of course. Can you have everybody ready to go in an hour?’

  ‘Of course. But—’

  ‘Good. I can’t order Will to go – he doesn’t work for my department now. But the county attorney’s on board with this plan – her department will pay his share of this operation. Will you tell him we would appreciate his cooperation? Thank you.’

  For several seconds after Delaney rang off, Sarah stood with the humming phone in her hand, watching Will’s stiff back. He was at the sink, staring out the window. Too angry to speak. She knew, as much as she dreaded inactivity in a hotel room, that he would hate it twice as much.

  ‘I’m sorry, Will,’ she said finally. ‘But will you help me now? There’s a lot to do.’

  When he turned, she saw that he had his thoughts collected and was ready, not just to do his part but to think of a hundred details she might forget.

  They prioritized quickly. Then she ran and found Aggie and got her started packing a duffle.

  Denny was in her room and, unlike the three adults in her household, she glowed with pleasure at the news.

  ‘A free weekend in a big hotel?’ she said. ‘What’s not to like? Can I take my bathing suit?’

  ‘Uh, sure, they might have an indoor pool.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right, we have to stay inside, don’t we? So what clothes?’

  ‘What you wear here – shorts and tees. One set of sweats or jeans in case the A/C is set too low.’

  ‘OK if I take my tablet? It’s got all my good games.’

  ‘Games, books, puzzles. It’s going to be a long, quiet weekend. Your job’s to keep everybody cheerful. But hurry. You have fifty minutes.’

  ‘Easy-peasy.’ In Denny’s eyes, Sarah’s three days of wretched boredom was a romp.

  Sarah ran downstairs and packed the most comfortable clothes in her closet. She found two books on her nightstand she’d been trying to get to for a month and downloaded a third onto her Kindle. Denny’s got the right attitude, she thought. We should try to get some fun out of this.

  The mood turned a little more somber whenever she crossed Will’s path. He was not grim, exactly, but thinking hard, getting tips from the SWAT team members still in the yard. ‘They’re asking us to leave the house unlocked,’ he said. ‘They’ll secure it if they get cleared to leave.’ So they took all their cash, which wasn’t much, and locked up their computers and Will’s toolshed. The hardest part was leaving their handguns behind, locked in their bedroom cubby. Sarah sighed as she dropped the key into the zippered pocket of her daypack.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of guns around,’ Will said.

  ‘I know. It just feels wrong.’ Sarah ran to Aggie and said, ‘Take all your money and your jewelry box. Got your pearls in there?’ Her mother had one good strand of pearls and an emerald ring from a couple of years on the ranch when the steers were all fat while the market was up.

  Aggie said, ‘Done. What about the kitchen?’ They froze what leftovers they could and disposed the rest. ‘Tucson’s feeding us this weekend,’ Sarah said. ‘It comes out even.’

  Krantz promised to put the trash out Sunday night. Then he was calling: ‘Heads up, the van’s here.’

  ‘I hope we thought of everything,’ Sarah said.

  ‘We’re not going clear off the planet,’ Will said, piling duffels in the driveway. ‘We can buy a candy bar wherever we go.’

  ‘Hey, yeah,’ Denny said. ‘Let’s do that.’

  Two heavily armed patrolmen jumped out to help load bags into the biggest SUV the department owned. Then they were all belted in and whirling off to … where?

  ‘Couldn’t find what we needed downtown,’ the man riding shotgun said. ‘Conventions had ’em all sewed up the next two days. So you’re going to the Hilton East. You’ll have your choice of watching mountains on one side or looking down on … nothing much on the other,’ he said, smiling into Denny’s beaming face. ‘You like that, huh? Should be a lively scene. Town’s full and the weather’s perfect.’

  ‘Any chance there’s a pool?’

  ‘Probably more than one,’ he said. ‘Here’s the brochure.’

  She grabbed it and began calling out gleefully the amenities she found: wi-fi, full-service gym, in-room movies. Nobody in the vehicle was inclined to rain on Denny’s parade, so the group rolled up to the back door of the towering hotel looking cheerful.

  The two men in the front of the vehicle, suddenly dead serious, said, ‘Sit still till we come back for you. Then please be prepared to move fast and silently.’ They jumped out of their seats carrying the assault rifles they took off an overhead rack. They were joined by four equally well-armed officers who piled out of vehicles that pulled up close on either side.

  The escort faced outward to do a quick check of the surrounding area, then alternated facing in, out and in again to make an aisle like a black-clad, armed-to-the-teeth wedding procession for their charges to walk through. Will went first. Then Denny, Aggie and Sarah all followed the beckoning hands of their guards. An inside team was holding the elevator. They were on the seventh floor and inside the suite with the door locked before Sarah had quite managed a deep breath.

  Their jolly driver’s helper, who had morphed into a ninja warrior when they arrived at the hotel, mellowed back again now into a kindly guardian who said his name was Josh and that he would take the first shift with them in the suite.

  ‘My orders are to stay on this door,’ he said. ‘So I can’t give you privacy in the sitting room but you’re welcome to close the doors on the bedrooms if you need to say something private. Order anything you want from room service anytime they’re open. When it comes I’ll ask you to step into the bedrooms. I won’t taste your food but I do vet the waiter. He won’t see you and you won’t see him.’ He beamed at them like a satisfied teacher on the first day of school. ‘Any questions?’

  Denny said, ‘Can I go swimming?’

  Josh said, ‘No, the pool’s outside.’

  ‘You get a vacation from swimming, be happy,’ Aggie said. Her face said, Don’t nag.

  Denny took a deep breath and said, ‘OK.’

  Josh smiled at her and said, ‘It’s dinnertime. Aren’t you hungry?’

  ‘Hey, I can always eat. Is everybody else ready?’

  At Denny’s urging they ordered a different dish for each of them with extra plates so they could all sample everything. The big platters of food, combined with the fatigue they had all been trying to ignore, reduced them all to brainless lumps of protoplasm. Te
n minutes after they sent the food away, the four of them were nodding over a thriller on the TV set. When Will began to snore they turned it off and went to bed.

  Sarah woke in the gray dawn, out of a dream of being stalked by an unseen menace through a forest of oleander bushes. Will was beside her, sleeping peacefully. She lay still for a few seconds, enjoying the comfort and safety. When she couldn’t wait any longer she slid out carefully, trying not to wake him, and was padding toward the door when he said softly behind her, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Just need the bathroom,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep.’ But when she came out he was standing by the bed in his underwear, pulling on his jeans. ‘What, you can’t go back to sleep?’

  ‘Already slept ten hours. Most I’ve had in one stretch in years. You want some coffee?’

  ‘I don’t think room service is awake yet.’

  ‘No, but there’s a coffee set-up out there in the sitting room. Relax here and I’ll see what I can do.’

  She got back in bed and thought, maybe just ten more minutes … Half an hour later she woke to the sound of Will coming through the door with cups and a carafe. ‘Hang on,’ he said, putting them down on her bedside table, ‘I think I saw a paper under the door.’ He was back in a minute with napkins and the morning paper.

  ‘God, you’re a ball of fire this morning.’

  ‘This isn’t all – I got info too. There’s a new man out there this morning. His name is Alvin and he was born to please. There may not be a pool indoors but he says there’s a great gym, running machines, weights – the whole nine yards. Soon as the extra guard gets here Denny and I can do a half-Iron Man – won’t she like that? There’s no limit; we can do another one Saturday. Also I talked to the news-stand in the lobby and ordered us a pile of Metropolitan papers for Sunday. You and Aggie can catch up on the news in New York and LA and London. How does that sound?’

  ‘Almost too much fun to imagine,’ Sarah said. ‘From now on I think you should forget about diet and exercise and just make sure you get plenty of sleep.’

  At home, Will was rarely idle. He loved his tidy workshop and spent most of his free time keeping their house and grounds shipshape. Cooped up for a weekend, Sarah saw, he dreaded the boredom. To cope with it he would concentrate on keeping everybody else amused.

  ‘Humor him,’ she told Aggie, who was gaping at his suggestion that he would try to get a patrolman to walk the halls with her if she felt in need of a hike. ‘He’s suffering separation anxiety from his toolshed.’

  Will and Denny got a stiff workout after breakfast. As soon as they were gone with the officer who came to guard them in the gym, Sarah settled her mother in a comfortable chair with a good light, saying, ‘I hope you brought a good book.’

  ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ Aggie said. ‘Been meaning to read it since you were little.’

  With all her family occupied, Sarah pulled a chair in front of a window in her own bedroom and began to stare out of it at the distant Rincon mountains, where nothing much was going on. A wisp of early morning cloud evaporated as the sun rose higher, leaving a featureless pale blue sky above the hazy peaks.

  From time to time her lips moved and she made a note in the small tablet on her lap.

  Will and Denny came back about one, drained of excess energy and showered to squeaky cleanliness. They all played a noisy word game during lunch. Then Will, who never read fiction, borrowed a thriller from Sarah and read for ten minutes before falling asleep. Aggie and Denny took turns reading and napping.

  Sarah continued to stare out the window. Slowly, her notes covered one page and then another.

  On Saturday morning their guard said, ‘Dispatch says we had several men call in sick so he can’t spare an extra guy for gym detail. Sorry.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Will said. ‘That workout yesterday – I’m getting complaints from a couple of muscles I forgot I had.’

  Sarah urged him to investigate the sports channels on TV and he took her up on it, sharing the riches with their sitting-room guard.

  ‘OK, Denny, time to get serious,’ Sarah said and unboxed a thousand-piece puzzle she’d been saving in case Aggie had another stroke and they had to take turns sitting vigil. They worked at it sporadically for the rest of the day, crowing so mightily when they placed the last two pieces that the two sports fans stuck their heads in, alarmed.

  A few minutes later Aggie turned the last page of Doctor Zhivago and said, ‘There, I did it.’

  ‘Good,’ Sarah said. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Mmm. Kind of like Gone With the Wind with snow.’

  By Sunday morning, when the papers came, they all dived into them like the starved news junkies they normally were not. For a couple of hours the only noise in the suite was the rustle of newsprint. Then the hotel sent up a complimentary sampling of Sunday brunch. By noon Sarah felt bloated with food and sated with information.

  Delaney called at one and asked, ‘How are you doing out there in the boonies?’

  ‘Just terrific,’ Sarah said. ‘Getting ready to Google a few items so we can finish the New York Times crossword.’

  ‘Sunk as low as that, have you? I better get you out of there before you get too depraved for police work.’

  ‘Don’t tease me, boss. Are you saying this torture could end?’

  ‘Yes. The teams covering your house are begging to be relocated to a gang war – they haven’t had three days this dull since they got their shields. I spoke to the chief and he agrees that this can’t go on forever. We’ll put one man walking your perimeter and assign an hourly drive-by to the man on the beat. Watch it for a couple of days and re-assess.’

  ‘So we can go home?’

  ‘Soon as I can find a van and a driver. Can you be ready in an hour?’

  ‘Would you believe ten minutes?’ She hung up and shared the news. Whooping with joy, they all threw things helter-skelter into duffles.

  At home they walked around the house, touching things, taking their spaces back. Sarah commandeered the laundry and washed piles of dirty clothes.

  Dietz unlocked his toolshed and did not come out for some time. ‘Not that I don’t trust the TPD to provide full security,’ he told Sarah when he took her out to see, ‘but just for the hell of it I got out my deer rifle.’

  He showed her how he disarmed his Remington, raised the hinged floorplate and cleaned it, checked the bolt action and gave the bolt and trigger mechanism a fresh rub-down with one of the silicone-impregnated soft cloths he kept in the case. ‘Then I re-armed it, see? Four bullets in the magazine and one chambered.’ Fresh and gleaming, it lay on a towel on his work bench with a box of ammo nearby.

  ‘Sooner or later,’ he said, ‘all these cops will have to leave. I expect you’ll have nabbed the guy by then, but just in case, I like to be ready.’

  ‘Beautiful, Will,’ Sarah said. She kissed him. ‘We’ll be fine, won’t we?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Aggie toured her tiny kitchen, opened cupboards and peered into the freezer. ‘What do you all want to eat tonight?’ she said and began naming off frozen leftovers. When she got to ‘a cupful of penne with some kind of sauce,’ Denny said, ‘How about a pizza with everything?’ and the affirmatives rang through the house.

  Delaney called an hour later. ‘Everything OK there? Nothing missing?’

  ‘Perfect. I’ll get the duty roster from Dispatch and send some thank-you notes – the guys on duty here did a great job.’

  ‘Good. The chief’s very anxious to call off the one remaining guard. Are you comfortable with that?’

  ‘Absolutely. The department’s been more than generous to us and we appreciate it, but Will and I can take it from here.’

  ‘I think so too.’

  ‘Can we have a meeting in the morning, please?’

  ‘Already on my skej. You have some thoughts?’

  ‘Thoughts, questions, even a few answers.’

  ‘Yeah, I think everybody does. See you in the morning.’


  Monday morning in the kitchen had an edgy feel – three silent adults getting back into their routines. Will and Sarah clipped on holsters and settled badges, and Aggie’s lips moved silently as she checked two lists.

  When the wall phone rang Sarah answered, said, ‘Just a moment,’ and told Denny, who had just wandered out in her pajamas, still half asleep, ‘This is for you.’

  Denny answered, blinking, her voice still gravelly. ‘Hello?’ And then, at little intervals, ‘Yes. OK. Fine.’ She hung the phone up, looking dazed.

  ‘My swimming class is canceled for two days. The coach had to go out of town.’ She slumped in her chair at the table, scowling. ‘Five days with no swimming, drat! I’ll be all flabby; I’ll lose my edge.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ Aggie said. ‘Flabby – for heaven’s sake, you’re as lean as a greyhound. Enjoy the break. Read another book.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Will said, settling his body camera and taser, ‘I have three interviews scheduled this afternoon, all on the south side of town. You want to do a ride-along? We can take a little detour on Valencia between calls and spot some cars.’

  ‘Hey, yeah. Could we?’

  ‘Sure. Bring a book to read while I’m working. And your car manual. We’ll practice on Toyotas and Hondas today.’

  ‘Oh, fab-a-docious. What time?’

  ‘I’ll pick you up right after lunch.’

  ‘And you and I,’ Aggie said, fixing her granddaughter with a stern eye, ‘are not going to say one more word about swimming again until Wednesday.’

  ‘Very well, dear Grandmother,’ Denny said. ‘Whatever you say.’ She folded her hands demurely in her lap and batted her eyes, copying a pose she had learned from an illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland. Aggie pointed one bony finger at her silently.

  ‘Careful, Denny,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s her threat pose. She used it to strike terror in me and my sister when we were growing up.’

  ‘And what I got from that was one cop and one outlaw,’ Aggie said. ‘Shows you what I know about child-rearing.’

  ELEVEN