Last Shot at Justice (A Thomas Family Novel Book 1)

by Kristi Cramer

  “HALO?”

  “High Activity Location Observation,” she explained. “It basically means Big Brother. DPD has cameras in places where crime often occurs. We just left one of those zones. We’ll find out soon enough if they were actively watching us, or if they have to go back and review tape.”

  They crossed 11th Avenue and were halfway down the block, running between a short wall behind the Arby’s parking lot and the back of buildings with peeling paint, graffiti, and weeds sprouting from the base of the walls. Dumpsters haphazardly skewed in the alley offered obstacles, not cover.

  Mitzi was considering hopping the short wall when another uniformed policeman stepped around the corner and stopped in front of them. Before either of them could react, the cop snagged Mitzi by the arm and dragged her back around the corner.

  Mitzi recognized Officer Peter “Mack” MacPherson, a man she had considered her friend until he slammed her up against the wall and put his nightstick up to her neck.

  Blue was right behind them, and he grabbed Mack under his arms and lifted him bodily up and away from Mitzi. In an incredible feat of strength, he held the one-hundred-eighty-pound man out away from him to avoid his kicking feet.

  “For Pete’s sake, Mitzi, call off your muscle,” Mack said, still trying to twist away from Blue’s grip. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Blue shook him, but Mitzi put out her hand. “Put him down,” she told him. Blue did as he was told, ramming Mack down hard enough to make him stumble and all the gear on his belt rattle.

  “What’s with the nightstick, Mack?” she demanded.

  “Just messing with you,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to shake off Blue’s hold. “I didn’t realize King Kong here was such an immovable object.” Leave it to Mack to mix a philosophical physics paradox with a pop culture reference.

  Mitzi eyed Mack, taking note of the typical blue uniform with the obvious bulletproof vest under the short-sleeved shirt, every pocket bulging with extra gear, the duty cap askew on his head.

  “He’s more like the irresistible force who could have put your head through the wall,” she retorted. “What are you doing, Mack?”

  “I’ll ask the same of you. I hear you went rogue, killed a hooker.”

  “Does that sound like me? You know me. We’ve been friends since Academy.”

  A little more than friends actually. They had gone on a couple dates before realizing a good friendship didn’t automatically mean you jump into bed with each other. Thankfully they realized it before complicating everything with sex. They had remained close friends until Mitzi’s promotion to detective resulted in less time spent together.

  “And that’s the only reason I didn’t radio in when I saw you coming. I said to myself, Mitzi isn’t a cold-blooded killer. The Chief must be wrong.”

  “More wrong than you know, Mack.”

  “What’s going on, Mitzi? We have orders to shoot you if we get a clean shot, for Pete’s sake!” Mack’s narrow face was now all earnest, his brow furrowed with concern.

  “I wish I could tell you, but I’m still trying to figure it out myself.”

  “At briefing this morning, Chief was all about how dangerous you are, and how you’ve been doing all kinds of illegal stuff. Said they had to move Justin into WITSEC. Me and some of the guys were looking at each other like ‘What?’ but we didn’t really have a chance to talk about it. If you ask me, Chief has been on the rampage about something all week.”

  Mack paused to take a breath, and Mitzi put her hand on his shoulder. She glanced at Blue, who loosened his grip and stepped back from him.

  “Will you help us? For the sake of our friendship, Mack, will you let us go?”

  Mack glanced up at Blue, then back to Mitzi. “I’ll do you one better. My patrol car is parked in front of the theater. I’ll give you a ride.”

  Just then his radio crackled to life. “Six Ocean to Six King. Hey, Mack? You see them? They were headed your way.”

  Mack reached for the radio mic on his shoulder, but Blue put his hand over it, pressing down so Mack couldn’t lift it, and couldn’t press the button.

  “Where’d you get this guy, Mitz? If I don’t answer, there will be questions.” Mack no longer tried to watch Blue. He assumed that Blue was taking his cue from her. She knew from years of playing poker with Mack not to trust those guileless blue eyes and that boyish grin. But Mitzi looked for his other tells and didn’t see any sign to indicate he was bluffing.

  She raised her eyes to meet Blue’s gaze, and he removed his hand. “Just don’t say anything stupid, Mack. He doesn’t want to get caught helping me. And he’s really effective at helping me.”

  Mack widened his eyes, as if trying to decide if that was a threat. Then he keyed the transmit button on his mic. “Six King to Six Ocean. Never saw ’em, Neil. They must have cut through the hotel.” He was talking about the parking garage of the Broadway Plaza, a block north from where they stood. “I’m gonna drive around the block, see if I can spot them. Six King out.”

  “Ten four,” Neil responded.

  “You coming?” Mack asked, heading down along the building toward the Acoma Street side of the Curious Theater.

  Mitzi and Blue looked at each other, and she took a deep breath.

  “I could run all day,” Blue said, glancing after Mack.

  “Not when there’s nowhere to go, Blue. They’re looking for us. They know we’re here, together. It’s my guess there’s a dozen cops converging on our location. It won’t take long to find out we didn’t cut through the hotel. We have a very small window to get out of here. If Mack was going to betray me, he would have done it already. If he does it now.... Well.” Mitzi shrugged, at a loss.

  Mack was waiting for them at the sidewalk, and she turned to follow him. “C’mon, Blue. I trust him.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, but she didn’t want to tell Blue that she was out of ideas.

  Chapter Twelve

  Blue followed Mitzi toward the policeman and his waiting car. He didn’t like this idea one bit, but he didn’t know what else to do. He guessed if Mitzi trusted this “Mack,” there wasn’t much he could do other than trust him too. But he sure didn’t look forward to being locked into the back seat of a cop car.

  Mack was standing with the door to the back seat open. “Only one of you can sit up front,” he said, almost apologetically. They were both looking at him, and Blue scowled as he walked up.

  “You so owe me,” he growled into Mitzi’s ear as he passed her and climbed into the back seat.

  “I know,” she said, and she had the good grace to sound sorry.

  The door closed him in, and sure enough, there was no way to get himself out. A black wire mesh rose between him and the front seat. He watched, feeling totally helpless as the two cops got into the front seats.

  “Where do you want to go, Mitz?” Mack asked.

  “You’re lo-jacked, right? So it would look weird if you left the search now.” She glanced back at Blue, but Blue didn’t know what “lo-jacked” meant. “We parked at the Merrick. Can you get us over there while making it seem like you’re looking for us?”

  “No problem, Mitz. Hey, pal, you ought to take off that hat. You too, Mitz. There’s a pretty solid description of you both now. That rock-for-brains Neil called it in when he spotted you by the library.”

  “Great,” said Mitzi as she took off her cap. Blue set the Stetson on the seat beside him. “Neil is pretty tight with the Chief, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he’s on escort duty for him a lot. Brown-noser. I never much liked him.” Mack was turning corners and seemed to be heading in a big circle back toward the garage where they had parked the car. So far, it seemed Mack was a man of his word.

  “What are they saying about the kidnapping?” Mitzi asked.

  “The Wharton girl? It’s funny. Not much is being said. We’re supposed to be looking for her too, but the Chief wanted more eyes looking out for you. Said the FBI was on the kidnap
case, and we’d be called in if we were needed. Seems strange to me. Usually it’s every available cop—on duty or off—looking for lost kids, even when it’s not the Mayor’s. I overheard Hatfield telling volunteers that we have more help than we need. I figure he’s got some beef with the FBI AIC, and is just being a jerk about it. Not the first time I’ve taken issue with the way Hatfield runs things.”

  “I remember,” Mitzi said. Blue wished he knew what kind of man Mack was. But since Mitzi wasn’t openly worried about the direction they were going, Blue thought he would just sit quietly and keep listening. He tried to follow the conversation, but Mack may as well have been talking in some kind of code.

  Mitzi continued. “You should have been promoted off that collar, and that gang kid should have done ten years. There’s no way you could have compromised the evidence like he said you did. We trained together. I remember how you kicked butt in Crime Scenes.”

  “I bet you do since it was your butt I was always kicking. Listen, we’ll go around to Sherman Street and I’ll let you off in the alley by the back lot. I’ll call in that I’m checking the garage, so they hopefully won’t hit it again.”

  “Mack,” said Mitzi. “You’re an angel. I won’t forget this.”

  “I plan on forgetting the instant you get out of the car,” he replied brightly. “But the sooner you work this crap out, the better.” Mack tapped his ear, giving Mitzi a meaningful look.

  “I hear you, Mack.”

  They turned a corner into an alley and slowed to a stop. Mitzi jumped out and opened the back door so Blue could climb out, too.

  Without another word or a backward look, Mack drove away.

  “Come on,” Mitzi said. “We’ll go up to the car and hang out there until dark.”

  “You think he’s good for it, that he won’t say he saw us and where he left us?”

  “Blue, Mack just broke about a dozen protocols for me. And there were at least half that many ways he could have screwed us before we even got here. He’ll stay quiet. Come on.” She headed for the stairs and they started climbing. As they rounded the second-floor landing, Blue saw Mack circling inside the garage, keeping pace with them.

  As they hit the landing for the third floor, Mack was coming around the corner. He looked straight ahead, even though Blue knew he could easily see them as they turned toward Miss Regina’s car. Blue breathed a little easier.

  “We’ll get in the car while he is up top, and hunker down so he won’t see us on the way down,” Mitzi said.

  Blue unlocked and opened the passenger door, and Mitzi slid in so he could close the door for her. Then he walked around and got in the driver’s side. They looked at each other across the space between them. Mitzi looked into the back seat, but Blue knew there wasn’t room between the newspaper stacks for either of them to lay down back there.

  “Um,” she said. From the corner of his eye, Blue saw headlights and a car rolling down the ramp, and he pulled Mitzi down until their torsos were awkwardly jumbled side by side, while their feet were still down on the floorboards as if they were seated. “Uncomfortable,” she said after a moment.

  They listened to the sound of the car passing, then she sat up, checking over her shoulder. “He’s gone. We still have about four and a half, five hours before dark. How are we going to do this?”

  Blue, still lying on his side, considered the situation. “You don’t think we can go now?”

  “I don’t want to risk it. If we leave here right after Mack and the wrong person sees us, that would be as bad as having Mack shout out that he helped us get here. If we wait until rush hour, we’ll have a better chance at blending in with traffic.”

  “Well, okay. The only way I can see this working is if we both lay out on this seat. I can’t stay bent in half like this for long, certainly not for three hours. Can we fit side by side?”

  “You want to spoon with me?” she asked skeptically.

  “It’s either that, or you lay on top of me,” he said, giving her a smile. Despite the fact that her “me first” response to Leigh Ann’s predicament had utterly disappointed him, he was delighted at the prospect of spending so much time in an intimate position with Mitzi. He was pretty sure he was over his attraction to her, but it seemed like a perfect opportunity to make her uncomfortable—a perfect revenge for how he felt.

  “Great.” She shifted forward to the edge of the seat. “Remind me to thank your trailer trash friend, who just had to store all the daily newspapers from the past decade in her back seat...what’s up with that, anyway?”

  “Miss Regina is not trailer trash,” he said, his smile disappearing. “She’s a sweetheart. You sure are quick to judge someone you know nothing about.”

  She fell silent, and he took the time to move himself into position across the seat, snaking up behind where she sat. “Come on,” he said. “Lie down before someone comes along and sees you.”

  Mitzi exhaled noisily and shifted her feet over to rest beside his, then stretched out with her back to him. Blue put his hand on her hip to help hold her on the seat, and felt his first inkling that he might have misjudged his state of detachment.

  “Great,” she grumbled again, in a tone he took to be sarcasm at its finest.

  ⋘⋆⋙

  Chief Winston Hatfield stalked through the gaggle of press just inside the doors of the Central Library. He glanced around before he caught sight of Sergeant Murray standing with a woman at the computer terminals. Murray, a skinny man in a loose-fitting, gray linen suit, waved him over.

  “Chief,” Murray said, tapping his pen to his forehead by way of greeting. “This is Nancy Spellman. She says she helped a man named,” here Murray looked down at his notes, “Blue Thomas from Syracuse, Kansas, with a guest pass for a computer. He told her he was looking for building projects in Englewood.” Murray paused meaningfully, then went on. “Nancy says there was a woman with him that meets the description Neil gave of Reardon.”

  Winston ran his gaze from Nancy’s high heel boots up her skinny-jean clad legs to her tiny waist and rail-thin bust. She caught his gaze with her own and stood up a little straighter, trying to enhance her figure. He gave her a tight smile, but spoke to Murray. “Did you check the browser history?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And?”

  “DPL has a policy of clearing the cache after each user logs out. Nancy says they didn’t log out, but someone else was at the machine, taking advantage of their login. Hard to say just when they left and the other person started in, but I can guess it was after they saw this.” Murray tipped his head slightly to indicate the screen, which displayed a picture of the Mayor’s family.

  Winston felt the smile freeze on his face. Acutely conscious of the press behind him, he stepped forward and closed the browser, hoping the distance and his body had kept any nosy reporter from identifying the picture on the screen.

  He glanced back at Nancy, who apparently had been looking only at him. Giving her another tight smile, he turned to face her, fishing a silver case out of his suit pocket to pull out a business card.

  “Nancy, was it?” She nodded and smiled back. “Thank you for your assistance in this matter. Please respect the fact that this is an ongoing investigation. You must not speak to the press about anything you saw or heard here. We’re dealing with very dangerous people, and we don’t want to tip our hand.”

  Nancy nodded and murmured something, letting her fingers linger on his as she accepted the card he held out to her. He was pretty sure she hadn’t heard a word he just said, so he leaned in close.

  “I’ll be back to give you a private interrogation,” he said in a low voice. She smiled as he leaned back. “Do you get my meaning?” he asked. She nodded, bringing the card coyly to lips painted passion pink. “Good. Speak to anyone but me, and I’ll show you just the ‘nice cop.’”

  “That would be a shame,” she said in a sultry voice, confirming that he had read her correctly as a woman who would enjoy the “bad cop” fant
asy. His eyebrows twitched upward slightly as he contemplated the enjoyment he would get out of that interrogation.

  He gave Nancy one last smile, then shooed her on her way.

  “How do I look, Murray?” He smoothed his blond hair back behind his ears, straightened his tie and patted it down, then checked to make sure his button-down shirt was tucked smooth in the waistline of his Armani suit and the collar of his jacket lay flat.

  “Like a freakin’ hero, boss,” Murray responded.

  Winston smirked at the obvious rusty trombone, then turned around to walk across the room to face the reporters.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” he announced, holding up his hands for silence, which fell immediately. He waited long enough for the cameras to train on him and microphones to be turned in his direction.

  Moments like this always gave him a buzz, and he savored the vision of expectant faces and flashes of cameras going off.

  “We have confirmed that our murder suspect was indeed here at the library, and that she has an accomplice helping her. Blue Thomas from Syracuse, Kansas, has been aiding police detective and suspected murderer Mitzi Reardon.” He paused to let the reporters write the name down, knowing they would research the Kansan better than his people ever could.

  “In light of her illegal activities, Reardon has been suspended from the force pending legal action. Both Reardon and Thomas are wanted for questioning and detention, but must be considered armed and extremely, extremely dangerous. We have been closing in on them all afternoon, and they’re surely feeling the pressure. Reardon is obviously unstable, and Thomas is a wild card. We’re asking the general public to be extra vigilant and report any sightings to Denver PD immediately. Thank you.”

  As soon as he stopped speaking, the reporters burst out with dozens of questions, most about what he thought the suspect had been doing at the library. He planned to ignore them, until he heard one woman ask an interesting question, the answer to which he wished he could personally direct to Reardon.

  “Have your officers been authorized to use deadly force in their capture?”