Chapter Nine
Sam battled her way through rush-hour traffic and was waved through security onto Ninth Street. The BMW practically parallel parked itself compared to her department-issued car. She took the ramp to her dad’s house and rapped on the door on the way in. “Yo, are you crazy kids decent?”
“Come in, Sam,” her stepmother, Celia, said from the kitchen.
Sam crossed the living room to the kitchen where Celia was quickly gathering a stack of paper while Sam’s dad sat in his wheelchair, looking on and seeming troubled.
“What’s going on?” Sam asked.
“Nothing,” Celia said, cheerful as always. “Just sorting through some stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Personal stuff,” Skip said pointedly.
Unaccustomed to being rebuffed by him, Sam slid into a kitchen chair and said, “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, honey,” Celia said. “You know how it is. Paperwork up the wazoo over every little thing.” She stood and bent to kiss Skip’s forehead. “I’m going to run this stuff upstairs and make some calls. You two enjoy a visit. There’s fresh coffee on if you want some, Sam.”
“Thanks.” She got up and helped herself to a cup of coffee, stirring in cream and sugar.
“Not like you to drink coffee in the middle of the day,” Skip said. “Doesn’t it keep you up?”
“Sometimes. But it’s so cold out that I need something warm.” She produced the signed form Trulo had given her and put it on the table where her dad could see it.
“I see you’ve graduated. Congratulations. Did he make you cry?”
“A little.”
“Awww, baby girl,” Skip said with a sigh. “I’ve been hoping you’d open up to someone. Trulo’s the best at what he does. Did it help?”
“I guess. Some.”
“So you’re going back to work?”
“Not right away.”
“Why not?”
She ran her finger around the rim of the mug. “I’m not ready, and I’m not quite sure why I’m not ready. I’m just not.” She wanted to tell him the truth. If only she knew how. It was different with him. He was nearly as invested in her career as she was.
“Okay…”
“What would you say if I decided to do something different?” she asked, using the most innocuous phrasing she could think of.
“Something different as in not be a cop anymore?”
“Possibly.”
He was quiet for a long moment before he began to speak. “Did I ever tell you how I almost hung up my badge after Steven was killed?”
Steven Coyne, Skip’s first partner, had been killed in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting when the two men were Patrol officers. “No, you didn’t.”
“I didn’t work for about two months after what happened to him. That he could be gunned down simply because he wore the uniform… Still gets to me to this day. I couldn’t bring myself to put on the badge, to care about the job or anything else for that matter.”
“What brought you back?”
“I had a family to feed. It was either go back and get on with it or start all over in another job. I didn’t want another job, but at that time, I didn’t want the one I had either.”
Sam was shocked to see her dad’s eyes fill with tears.
“I loved him like a brother. We had an immediate bond in the academy that lasted through the first couple of years on the job. I hate to even say such a thing, but imagine someone gunning down Freddie just because he wears the blue.”
“I can’t.” The thought was too awful to allow into her muddled brain.
“Exactly. It was that bad. I was inconsolable and filled with an unreasonable amount of rage. I’d never experienced anything even close to that.
I honestly didn’t know if I had it in me to go back to work, to put on that uniform, to work the beat without Steven by my side.
How would I ever again trust a partner to have my back the way he did?
How would another partner trust me when I’d failed Steven so completely? ”
“How did you fail Steven?”
“He was shot when I was six feet from him.”
“Could you have stopped it?”
“It was over before I knew it was happening.” As he said the words, Sam could see the weight of the guilt and grief he carried with him all these years later in the grim expression on his face.
“I couldn’t have stopped it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was six feet from him.
What kind of cop allows something like that happen to his partner when he’s right there?
What kind of cop never catches a glimpse of the car or the shooter?
I was tortured by those questions. The only way I could sleep without continuously reliving the horror of seeing his head practically blown off was if I medicated myself with Jack Daniel’s. ”
“I’ve always known about Steven, of course,” Sam said. “But you’ve never talked about how it affected you.”
“No, I haven’t, because I couldn’t. Thirty years after it happened it’s still right up there as the worst day of my life.”
“Worse than when you were shot?”
“Way worse.” Grimacing, he added, “He’d just gotten married. He and Alice were crazy about each other. She was all he talked about, to the point that I begged him to shut up about her. I had to go there, to tell her…”
Sam moved to the chair next to his and put her hand over his right hand, the one extremity that had somehow retained nearly full sensation after he was shot.
“Some things you never get over, Sam. You figure out a way to live with them, but you never forget. I think of Steven every day. He’s always with me, as is the guilt and the grief and the pain of his loss.”
“I’m sorry you went through that.”
“I’m sorry you went through what you did, too. But if you leave the job, baby girl, that son of a bitch will win. He’ll win.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. “How’d you find your mojo again after you went back?”
“Took a long time. It was more than a year before I felt sort of like my old self again. I was never again the person I was before that day, but the new me found a way to cope and go on. The support of the brotherhood helped. There weren’t as many sisters then as there are now, so the brother- and sisterhood will get you through.
They’ll prop you up when you feel like you can’t go on.
The cases helped. They keep on coming whether we want them to or not.
The people we serve help. In their lowest moments it’s hard to think of our own problems. After a while, you get back into the groove and you stop thinking you can’t do it anymore because you are doing it.
You’re closing cases and writing reports and interviewing witnesses and interrogating suspects and testifying in court like you always did.
Life goes on. It moves forward and takes us with it. ”
“What happened to me was nothing compared to losing your partner that way.”
“It wasn’t nothing. Someone you should’ve been able to trust with your life tried to take your life. It was not nothing. But he doesn’t deserve to sit in his jail cell knowing he took from you something you loved. He doesn’t get to do that, you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“You’re going back to work. If you get there, and a few months from now it’s not happening and you want to hang it up, then so be it. You’ll have my full support. But you will not give that piece of shit the satisfaction of thinking he took it from you. You will not.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Good.”
“I’ve decided to take a more active role as second lady.”
“Really?” His grunt of laughter made her smile. “Didn’t see that coming.”
“Neither did I, but I’m seeing it as an opportunity to shine some light on things that matter to me, including raising money for spinal cord injury research and adoption and infertility and law enforcement. Those kinds of things.”
“All worthy causes.”
“I think so, too.” She stood, kissed his forehead and laid her head on his shoulder. “Thanks for this. It was what I needed.”
“Anytime, baby girl.”
“How’s the pain today?”
“Manageable.”
“So the needles are helping?” she asked, cringing. Acupuncture was one of several remedies the doctors at the National Institutes of Health had recommended to combat the pain of Skip’s nerves coming back to life after the bullet that had been lodged in his spine for three years was removed.
“Seem to be.”
“How’s the sensation?”
“Tingles all around, but no real movement.”
“Yet. They said it could take months.”
“And they said it also might not happen. No matter, I’m better than I was, and that’s good enough for me.”
“For now.”
“Do you know what John Adams once said about the vice presidency?” Nick asked his chief of staff, Terry O’Connor, during a late-day strategy session.
“What’s that?”
“Adams said, it’s ‘the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.’”
Terry laughed. “It certainly has that reputation.”
“I want to change that. I want to do things, not sit around and wait to be asked to participate.” Over the last few weeks, Nick had had a lot of sleepless nights in which he’d had to force himself to think of something—anything—other than the troubles that plagued his precious wife.
“Nelson has his team in place, and they’ve been with him for years—decades in some cases.
I’m a Johnny-come-lately, so naturally he has no real use for me.
He’s got his people, and they’re out forwarding his agenda.
I did what he needed by boosting his ratings.
The country approves of his choice of a vice president, and he’s moved on.
So there’s no reason I can’t set my own agenda and give attention to things that matter to me. ”
“No reason at all,” Terry said. “What’ve you got in mind?”