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Dead.
She heard the men confer, but made no effort to decipher words. Footsteps, and finally Quinn lifted her like a child and sat her on the couch in the living room. Mindy began to shiver.
“Don’t you have a throw?” he said in frustration.
She squeezed her arms against her body and rocked herself, hardly aware when he disappeared and then reappeared with a comforter he must have torn from the bed in the guest room. Even inside it, she continued to shiver. Her teeth chattered.
A weight settled on the couch beside her and Quinn held a mug to her mouth. Tea. Clumsily, with his help, she drank. Hot liquid ran down her chin, joining the tears that wet her face.
After a moment she took the mug from him and gratefully wrapped cold fingers around it. She drank again, letting it scald her mouth, aware it was sweeter than she would have made it but not caring. The heat sliding down her throat felt so good. Her shivers abated.
Finally she lifted her head. The sergeant stood a few feet away, looking down at her with concern. Quinn still sat beside her, his thigh touching hers, his face so close she could see individual bristles on a chin that was normally clean-shaven.
“You’re sure?” she asked. Begged.
“We’re sure,” Dickerson said.
Still pleading, although no longer with them, Mindy said, “What will I do?”
There was a momentary silence, and then Quinn stood. “What will you do?” He sounded harsh, the man who had always condemned her without knowing her at all. “I’m sure Dean left you taken care of.”
“I didn’t mean…” she tried to explain.
“Do you have someone we can call?” Sergeant Dickerson interrupted. “Family? A friend?”
She instinctively rejected the idea of calling her mother. Selene was her best friend, but…she was such a talker. She wouldn’t know how to hold Mindy without exclaiming over and over and wanting to dissect the tragic events. And who else could Mindy phone in the middle of the night to say, “My husband is dead. Can you come hold my hand?”
Mindy shook her head. “I’ll wait until morning.” Until then…until then, she didn’t know what she’d do. She couldn’t go back to that lonely bed. Perhaps she would just huddle here and try to imagine the man she loved gone. Erased as if he hadn’t existed.
“We’ve only been married a year.” She heard her voice, high and petulant, as if Dean had broken a promise. But he hadn’t. Till death do us part. It just wasn’t supposed to be so soon!
The two men were talking again as if she wasn’t here.
“I want to work this one,” Quinn said. “Who pulled it? Sawyer and Asavade?”
“Dobias and Williams. And the answer is no. You’re dead on your feet. And you’re too involved.”
“He was my best friend. I need to make this collar.”
“Uh-huh. You going to do it dispassionately? Read ’em their rights? When what you really want to do is kill them?”
Quinn paced, fury and grief radiating from him like heat from a woodstove. Mindy felt it without having to watch him.
“Goddamn it! Don’t shut me out!”
“No.” The sergeant didn’t move. Like Quinn, he seemed to have forgotten her. “Dean radioed in a license-plate number. There may have been an arrest already.”
She listened without real comprehension. Dean was dead? It made no sense. She would have worried if he’d still been a cop, but he owned his own security company. He hardly ever took a shift as a guard anymore. He met with property owners and businessmen, did payroll and billing, grumbled about how hard it was to find and keep good employees.
“They all either want to be cops or prison guards.” He’d made a sound of disgust. “They like the idea of swaggering around in a uniform with a gun in a holster. They find out how boring it is patrolling warehouses and apartment complexes at night, they opt out.”
Mindy came back to awareness of the present when she realized that Sergeant Dickerson had sat on the coffee table. Quinn stood to one side.
“Mindy? You with me?”
She nodded.
“Do you know why Dean worked tonight?”
She nodded again. “A new guy called in sick. Dean was really mad, because it was last minute. The dispatcher offered to go out, but Dean said he’d do it. He liked to once in a while, you know.”
“Any good businessman gets down in the trenches. He’d be a fool not to.”
“I wish…” Tears leaked out although she’d thought herself cried dry. “I wish somebody else had been there. But I feel guilty wishing they were dead instead.”
Dickerson covered her hand with his. “It’s natural, Mindy. You didn’t know them.”
“I do know Mick Mulligan. He’s the dispatcher.” She tasted the tears. “He’s married, and he has two little girls.”
That thought caused a lurch within her, of fear, of renewed guilt, of raw grief. Dean had really wanted to have children. She was the one to put pregnancy off.
“Let’s wait a couple of years,” she’d coaxed. “Let’s be selfish and just have each other for a while first.”
Quinn said explosively, “What if it was a setup? Goddamn it, Dickerson! Let me work this one.”
“Go home. Go to bed.”
A vast, terrifying emptiness swelled within Mindy. They’d both leave any minute. She’d be alone in the house. It was a big house, bigger than she liked, with a cavernous three-car garage and bedrooms they didn’t use, a den and a family room. She could feel those empty, dark rooms around her, echoing her inner fear.
She made a sound—a sniff, a gulp. Still engaged in their argument, both men turned their heads to look at her. She looked down at her hands, clutching the comforter.
“We can’t leave her alone.” Quinn sounded irritated. “I’ll stay.”
That brought her head up. “No! You don’t have to.” But she wanted him to stay. He made her feel safe, and tonight she was terrified of being alone.
His mouth, she’d have sworn, had a faint curl. “If you don’t have a friend you can ask to come over, I do have to stay.” He sounded as if he were talking to a five-year-old who had just announced that she could walk across town all by herself to Grandma’s house. His gaze left her; she was dismissed. To Dickerson, he said, “You’ll keep me informed?”
Mindy shrank into her comforter, wishing she had the spine to stand up, say with dignity, “No, thanks, I’d like to be alone,” and walk them to the door. She’d have been grateful for Quinn’s offer if it had come from anyone but him, or even if he’d made it more kindly. He’d always had a talent for making her feel small.
Her care settled, Sergeant Dickerson expressed his sympathy and regret one more time, then left. Quinn walked him to the door, and they stood out of earshot talking for several minutes, their voices a rumble.
Finally Quinn locked up behind the sergeant and came back to her. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“No!” She shuddered. “No. I can’t get in our bed.”
“The guest room, then.”
She didn’t want to go to bed at all. Did he really imagine that she’d lay her head on the pillow and fall into blissful slumber? In the dark, all she would do was imagine a thousand times what had happened to Dean. Had the shot come from nowhere? Or had he been held at gun-point, threatened, beaten? Did he know he might die? She both wanted and didn’t want to know. I’m a coward, she thought. She would lie there wondering what would happen tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.
But she also saw that Quinn wanted her to go to bed, so she nodded and put her feet on the carpeted floor. When she stood, she swayed, and he was at her side instantly, his strong hand clamped on her elbow. He walked her to the downstairs bedroom, and she felt like a child being put to bed. When she climbed in, he spread the comforter over her, then stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed.
“Can I get you anything?”
Mute, she shook her head.
Quinn came around the bed, his hand out to switch off the lamp. She shook her head violently. “No! Leave it on. Please.”
He frowned at her. “You’re sure?”
“I don’t… The dark…”
“Okay. I’ll be right out there. Call if you need me.”
“Thank you,” she said dutifully.
Seemingly satisfied, he left, switching off the overhead light and pulling the door almost closed. His footsteps receded toward the living room.
The sheets were cold, the pillow squishy. It was like being in a hotel room. But she couldn’t seem to care enough to try to bunch up the pillow or even reach for the second one. She just lay on her back and stared at the ceiling.
The house was Dean’s, not hers. The life his. One she’d put on like a borrowed evening gown. She’d felt beautiful and loved and fortunate, but not quite secure. Because, she saw now, it wasn’t hers.
A broken sound escaped her.
Dean. Oh, Dean.
The tears came again, so easily, as if only waiting to be released. But this time she cried silently, alone.
JUST AFTER SIX IN THE MORNING, Quinn’s cell phone rang.
“We got ’em,” Dickerson said without preamble. “They didn’t realize Dean had had time to call in their plate.”
“What were they after?”
“They’re nineteen and twenty-one. They were manufacturing meth in the young one’s father’s trailer. He moved it to storage without them knowing. They’d come to get their stuff, or steal the trailer. Sounds like they were still arguing about that.”
“And the guard that called in sick?”
“Had a hot girl over. Dobias said when he realized he’d be dead if he had gone to work, he barely made it to the toilet to puke.”
“He might not be dead,” Quinn said. “Maybe he’d have timed his route different. Been lazy and not gone in if the gates were closed.”
“He’ll figure that out eventually,” Dickerson said without sympathy. “Apparently, Dobias didn’t feel inclined to point that out.”
Quinn sank onto the couch and bowed his head. He swore. “A couple of goddamn punks.”
“Strung out.”
“And that’s it.” He shoved his fingers into his hair, uncaring when they curled into a fist and yanked. “Dean’s gone, and Daddy’ll probably hire a good lawyer who’ll claim they were too stoned to take responsibility for pulling the trigger.”
“You know the D.A. will try to throw the book at them.”
“Son of a bitch,” he said clearly, and pushed End, letting the phone drop to the carpeted floor.
Two shit-faced punks who’d freaked, and Dean was dead.
Quinn didn’t want to believe it. He’d dozed briefly on the couch, and in his sleep had been woken by Dean, who had punched him in the shoulder and said, “What in hell are you doing on my couch? Your own bed not good enough for you?” Quinn had met the grin with his own, and reached out for his friend’s hand. He’d woken before they touched, and opened his eyes to an empty living room.
Down the hall, a bar of light still lay across the carpet. Mindy had never turned off the lamp. He wondered if she’d slept. Wasn’t sure if he cared. She’d known Dean for a year and a half, not a lifetime.
Dean and Quinn had been flung together as roommates in a foster home when Quinn was thirteen and Dean twelve. Almost twenty years ago. They’d had a fistfight the first day, grudgingly agreed to a truce the second day, and by the third Quinn had lied to protect the younger boy from their foster father’s wrath. Wrath, both had realized as the weeks and months went by, that was more show than reality; George Howie was a good man, as kind in a less demonstrative way as his wife. The two boys had been lucky in more ways than one. They’d been able to stay until, each in his turn, they’d graduated from high school. And they’d become close friends. Brothers.
As the night dragged on, Quinn had done his grieving, as much as he’d allow himself. His mother had taught him well that he couldn’t afford to be incapacitated by fear or sadness. He didn’t even know who his father was. His mother was an addict who’d progressed during his childhood from pills and pot to shooting up. She’d disappear for days at a time. He’d scrounge for food. By the time he was eight or nine he was shoplifting when the cupboards were bare. His mother got skinnier and skinnier, the tracks on her arms and legs livid, veins harder to find. He learned how to catch her at the perfect moment to get her to cash her welfare check so he could take some money before she spent it.
He remembered the last time he saw her, her eyes hectic.
“I feel like shit. I’ve got to score. Now, you go to school, hear? I might not be home tonight, but you can take care of yourself, right?”
She hadn’t waited for an answer. She’d known he could. He’d been doing it since he was six years old.
Only, that time she hadn’t come home. The police finally came knocking. She’d overdosed and was dead, they told him with faint sympathy. They’d looked at the squalor of the apartment and shaken their heads. Child Protective Services workers came to get him.
The Howies’ was Quinn’s fourth foster home. Either he did something wrong, or the people lost interest in fostering. One family decided to move to Virginia and didn’t offer to take him. Another one got nervous when their daughter turned eleven, started to get breasts and developed a crush on the brooding boy they were collecting state money for. Each time, he shrugged and moved on.
Until he finally found somebody to care about. Dean Fenton, a skinny boy with a copper-red cowlick and freckles on his nose.
“My mom’s coming back for me,” he’d always said.
Quinn tried at first telling him that she was probably dead like his mother, but Dean would throw fists and scream, “She’s not!” so Quinn took to shrugging and saying, “Yeah. Sure. Someday.”
The adult Dean had gotten drunk one night and said, “Yeah, she’s dead. I always knew. Give me hope over truth any day.”
Quinn drank a toast to that—hope over truth—even though he didn’t believe in fantasies. He’d have starved to death as a kid if he’d allowed himself to dream. You survived in this life by facing facts.
But Dean…Dean had softened Quinn. Made him laugh, acknowledge that sometimes faith in another person was justified.
They’d balanced each other, because Dean needed to be more of a cynic. The saving grace was that he listened to Quinn.
Had listened, Quinn corrected himself, lifting his head to look at that band of light on the carpet. Dean hadn’t wanted to hear a bad word about pretty Mindy Walker. Quinn had shrugged and shut his mouth, figuring the romance would pass. He could remember his shock when Dean had come over on a Sunday afternoon to watch the Seahawks play and said, “Congratulate me. Mindy agreed to marry me.”
They’d both said things they regretted then, but they’d patched up their friendship, and Quinn resigned himself to the inevitable divorce, something Dean wouldn’t take well after a lifetime of instability.
Now there wouldn’t be a divorce. Instead, there’d be a funeral. Quinn wouldn’t be listening to drunken soliloquies and supporting a staggering friend home. Instead, he was left with the grieving widow. A flighty, shallow girl-woman with spiky blond hair and a pierced belly button who played at arts and crafts.
Quinn let out a soft oath. Dean would expect his best friend to take care of his bewildered widow, the woman whose first thought hadn’t been of her husband, tragically struck down, but rather, “What will I do?”
“Damn you, Dean,” Quinn said under his breath. “Why her?”
CHAPTER TWO
