CHAPTER SIX
“You’re kidding!”
Raelynn Hayes gave Sam a wan smile. “‘Fraid not.”
“That’s bullshit! You’ve been the backbone of that unit for eleven years!”
Rae shrugged. “That’s what I thought. I guess she sees it differently.”
“Well, she’s a bitch, and I heard her husband’s cheating on her with her sister.”
Rae giggled. She nearly spilled her beer, but the laughter felt good. It felt a lot better than the tears she'd shed in her car before driving to the Bark Lounge to commiserate with her best friend over the promotion she'd been passed up for yet again.
Sam was always good at cheering up. The crazy Cubana cholita—her words for herself that Rae would never repeat out loud—retained her exuberance and love of life even now that they were both on the wrong side of forty and had settled into a life of mundanity and survival instead of excitement and achievement.
Maybe that was Rae’s problem. She still hoped to achieve something. Maybe she should just be content being a middle manager in the ATF’s K9 program and stop trying to put her name on a list of leaders in the organization.
“I have to admit,” she told her friend, “It’s fun imagining Trudy getting cuckolded by her sister. Is that the right word when it’s women, or does that apply only to men?”
Sam shrugged. “Whatever. Fuck that bitch. Or don’t, actually. She can go fuck herself.”
“I wasn’t planning to fuck her, but thank you.”
“She’d be lucky,” Sam said, waving her finger at Rae before sipping her cosmo. “But seriously, girl, don’t sweat it. Your time will come.”
Rae tried to laugh but could only manage a soft scoff. “Yeah, maybe.” She sipped her beer and shrugged. “Whatever. I’m four years away from fully vesting in my pension. Maybe I’ll leave after that and just focus on my paintings.”
“Girl, you totally should!” Sam said. “They’re really good. I’m not just saying that because I’m your friend, either. I would totally buy one of your paintings.”
Rae smiled at Sam, whose most artistic purchase had been a plastic plate with the phrase LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE printed on it in cursive. “You’re a queen, you know that?”
“Hell no, chica. It’s your world. I just live in it.” She laid her hand over Rae’s. “You okay?”
Rae sighed and admitted, “Not really. But I will be. It’s just a tough day.”
“You know what they say. The sun will come out tomorrow.”
“Do they say that?”
“I don’t know. I heard they do, but I haven’t talked to them in a while.”
Rae chuckled again and the two friends pointedly ignored Rae’s missed promotion for the rest of the evening.
For a while, Rae was even able to forget the fact that she was trapped in a career black hole from which she would never escape.
Too late. She was already past the event horizon.
Nothing left to do but orbit until she spiraled into the center and was finally pulled apart.
***
She dropped Sam off at home, prepared to endure a scolding from Sam’s husband for getting his wife drunk first thing in the goddamned morning. To her pleasant surprise, Jacob was very gentle with her and even asked if she wanted to stay with them for the day so she didn’t need to be alone.
Rae declined the offer but promised to join them for their Memorial Day celebration later in the year. She gave Sam a final hug goodbye, then headed home to decompress for the rest of the day.
Trudy had given her a little bit of crap about taking her personal day with such short notice, stopping just short of telling her to suck it up about the promotion.
Rae had endured it but insisted on keeping the day.
Her tenure with the ATF made it impossible for Trudy to refuse. So there was that, at least.
She felt out of sorts on the drive home. Maybe because it was daylight, and she was still a little buzzed from the beer. Not too buzzed. Still fine to drive. Just…
“I’m just pissed off,” she admitted aloud. “I’m pissed the fuck off. I deserve that promotion. It’s all because of some bullshit that happened years ago that doesn’t have shit to do with anything. That’s the only reason they’re getting away with it.”
She felt tears threaten and turned up the radio to try to distract from them. It almost worked.
She hadn’t thought about that incident in months.
Nor should she. It had nothing to do with who she was now.
It was like canceling a professor’s tenure for cheating on a math test in middle school.
She wasn’t even with the ATF when it happened.
And it wasn’t entirely her fault. Or even mostly her fault. A lot of people had fucked up, and…
And she had no idea how it had impacted their careers. Maybe they were at dead ends too. Maybe that was just the price of their failure.
Well, whatever. It could be worse. She still had a good job. She still got to work with dogs. Her subordinates were… annoying sometimes but no more so than any group of law enforcement agents. Dick-waving was just a part of the job whether you possessed the aforementioned appendage or not.
She stopped by a convenience store on the way home, purchased a bottle of wine, a pint of peanut butter chocolate chip ice cream, a baggie of gummy bears, and a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers that would probably wear out by the end of the night.
That was just fine with her. She could only afford one night of this kind of regression anyway.
The clerk regarded her with the perfect impassivity of a man who made a living selling junk food to despondent adults and no longer cared enough to judge them or feel sorry for them.
She paid for her snacks and slippers and reached home in a slightly better mood.
Tomorrow was her regularly scheduled day off, so she could finish that bottle of wine and sleep off the hangover without a care in the world.
She’d rent some sappy romance movies and some even more ridiculous horror movies and pretend she was twenty years old, and every dream she’d ever had was guaranteed to eventually come true.
She parked her car in her spot and whistled as she made her way up the stairs to her apartment.
She lived in a nice building in Riverside, close to downtown but known for being very safe despite that proximity.
She could buy a home if she wanted, but she was a confirmed bachelorette and liked the coziness of the one-bedroom flat.
She didn’t really need the promotion. She was fine. She would be fine.
It was just… so much less than she thought she’d achieve. She wanted to be one of the women, the ones other women looked up to and wanted to be like. She didn’t want a comfortable life. She wanted a legacy.
And she’d never have one. All because of something that wasn’t her fault.
She opened the door, stepped inside, and immediately knew something was wrong. She froze, whistle dead on her lips, bag o’ junk swinging slowly in her hand.
It was several seconds before she realized exactly what was wrong. When it came to her, it was so absurd that she almost believed she was drunker than she thought and was only imagining it.
But she wasn’t. She could see the scuff marks on the wood floor underneath her coffee table. Everything in her living room had been moved six inches to the right.
What the hell?
She set the bag down and closed the door behind her. She drew her service weapon and pulled back the slide. If she hadn’t taken her weapon home, she would have left the apartment and called the police. Her last few seconds of life would be spent wishing she had done that.
She saw the box on the small end table that sat between her couch and her easy chair. She had spent sixteen years with ATF and knew immediately what it was without needing to pick it up. The blood drained from her face. She started to turn from the house, crying, “Oh G—”
A gloved hand clamped tightly around her mouth while another grabbed the slide of her gun. She spent a few seconds wishing. Then those wishes and all of her worries, large and small, were no longer her problem.