Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3) (7 page)

This is where he calls the real cops,
I thought.
This is where Sierra and I get the book thrown at us and I never act again.

“It worked,” I told him. “Didn’t it? You believed it.”

His eyes were bugging out. “I—But—this isn’t how you audition!” He stared at me. “Have you any idea how many laws you’ve broken?! You put me in
handcuffs!
In front of—” He tried to indicate the office around him.

I was desperate, now. “I’m sorry! I know! But I missed you at Fenbrook and this was my only chance. I’m
perfect
for this. This is all I’ve dreamed about for three years.
Please
give me a chance!”

He shook his head, backing away from me. “This is crazy. I’m calling security.” And, with some difficulty, he pressed a button on his desk phone with his handcuffed hands.

Shit!
I could feel my stomach shrinking down to a tight, cold knot of fear. I was going to get kicked out…maybe arrested. Sierra was going to get suspended. I had no way to pay my rent, now that I’d given her the $500. “Mr. Dixon,
please!”

He just shook his head again and dialed a three-digit number. He had it on speakerphone and I heard it start to ring at the other end.

I looked toward the door. Should I run? Was there any point? They’d catch me in the lobby.
Shit!
How had this gone so badly wrong?!

“Security,” said a voice from the phone.

I closed my eyes and waited for Dixon to seal my fate. Several seconds passed. I opened my eyes and he was staring right at me. Furious…but considering.

“Security?” the voice said. “Hello?”

Dixon kept on staring at me. And then he pressed a button and the phone went dead. He took a long, shuddering breath. “You better be one
amazing
actress, Jasmine,” he said.

I swallowed, barely daring to hope. “I am!”

“You get
one shot,”
he warned.

“That’s all I want!”

He took a deep breath and then nodded. “Okay. Okay, I’m probably going to regret this, but...I’ll put you in the screen test. We’re doing one big one for everyone next week. I’ll see how you are in a scene, and how you mesh with the rest of the cast.”

My heart soared. “I won’t let you down! I swear!”

“You’d better not. Now please: get these cuffs off me?”

He turned around and I started fiddling with the cuffs. After a few moments, he asked, “What are you doing?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “There’s normally a little lever you press….”

There was a long pause. When he spoke, he kept his voice carefully neutral.

“I think what you’re describing are sex shop handcuffs,” he said. “Real ones don’t have a quick-release lever. You need the key.”

I felt my face go beet red. Yes, that was
exactly
what I’d been basing my experience on. I said nothing and looked on the belt for the key.

And looked.

And looked.

Dixon broke the silence. “Please, in the name of all that is holy, tell me you haven’t just locked me in handcuffs you don’t have the key for.”

“No,” I said quickly. “I have it. It’s on this belt somewhere. I just...don’t know where.”

There was another silence. It was exactly long enough for Dixon to have counted to ten in his head.

“Jasmine,” he said. “I have a feeling your screen test is either going to go very, very right or very, very wrong.”

***

Ten minutes later, I’d rushed down to the street so that Sierra could show me where the key was located, dashed back up to free Dixon, returned back down to swap outfits with Sierra so she could get back to her beat and finally trudged back up to Dixon’s office.

“Would you like a glass of water?” asked Dixon, looking at my panting, reddened face.

“Yes...please…” I managed.
I need to start going jogging with Clarissa.

He passed me a cool glass of water and I glugged it down gratefully.

“Okay,” he said. “The show.”

He explained that the show -
Blue & Red
- was going to be a drama series following the lives and loves of a group of cops, ranging from rookies to old hands. There’d be breaking down doors and chases and arrests, but also affairs and rivalry and even some sex. He was going for a gritty, realistic feel. “I’ll need you to really get into the mindset of being a cop,” he told me. Really become one of them.”

Playing a cop was my dream role. But
become
one of them? Old habits die hard. I’d spent too many years tensing up whenever I saw a cop

Something must have shown in my expression because he asked, “That isn’t a problem for you, is it?”

“Of course not!” I said quickly. And I told myself I was being an idiot. He just wanted me to make it realistic. Fine. I could do that. It was still just acting.

“The part I want you for is Isabel O’Mara, a rookie cop fresh out of the academy,” he said.

O’Mara.
I could
do
Irish. I sure as hell had the hair for it. And then my stomach tightened as I thought about my auburn locks and their origins.

“She’s young, shy, a little naive,” said Dixon. “But she also has a big heart. She falls for a cop and they have an on/off relationship throughout the first series. In fact, you two are the big romantic interest.”

Romantic? I could do romantic! “Sounds great!” It was looking like my crazy plan might actually pay off. I just hoped I’d hit it off with the actor playing my love interest.

Chapter 7

Ryan

I was a different person.

I remembered Ryan, that guy I used to be. I remembered the way he used to laugh and joke and get drunk and sing too loudly in the local cop bar. I remembered him falling hard for a beautiful woman named Jasmine he could never have.

But that guy wasn’t there anymore.

When I looked at myself in the mirror each morning, it felt as if I was looking at someone else. As if I was inhabiting another body, an empty shell I could operate like a puppet to fool all the normal people. Their bodies still had personalities inside. All I had was anger.

It would hit me out of nowhere, the slightest thing—even something innocent—setting it off. It was like when you turn the faucet the wrong way, and instead of the trickle you expected you get a blasting torrent. And when it happened, I couldn’t shut it off.

They’d offered me counseling, of course. They were
all about
counseling, in the first week after it happened. And I don’t doubt the woman they sent me to was the best, but counseling only works if you participate. Day after day, I’d sat there in silence. I couldn’t put into words what I’d seen and heard. A man—a man with a wife, with kids—transformed into a cold mound of flesh on the ground by my own stupidity. The word I focused on most was
if.

If
I’d gone into the house ahead of him.

If
I hadn’t answered the call when it wasn’t even close to us.

If
I hadn’t been hounding Jasmine in the first place.

The counselor asked me if I’d had any
troubling thoughts.
When I asked what that meant, she asked if I was suicidal.

I lied and said no.

In truth, I couldn’t think of a fair way of doing it. What I really wanted was to bash my head against a wall until I stopped thinking anymore, but that would be an escape and I didn’t deserve escape. I deserved to suffer for all time.

Hux made sure of that. I mean, not in a cruel way. It wasn’t like he was haunting me out of malice. He was just
there,
looking over my shoulder at everything I did and offering comment. I wasn’t sure whether I was being full-on supernatural haunted, or just hearing voices and cracking up. I wasn’t sure which explanation would be worse.

So I kept going, the anger rising and falling inside me but never disappearing. I kept it caged, most of the time, so in retaliation it tore up whatever was left inside me. A month after Hux died, I was the walking dead, just a shell with the hot, black, twisting anger coiled inside, ready to strike at whoever was unlucky enough to set me off.

***

I was parked up on the street, engine off. In theory, I was supposed to be taking a statement from some jeweler who claimed he’d seen suspicious characters hanging around. It wasn’t the first time I’d been out to him, and I knew that the reason for his suspicion was down to the color of their skin.

I’d been there ten minutes, though, and hadn’t gone inside. All my attention was focused on a sign way, way down the street, so far away that the white and the orange and the pink blended into a blur, and you could only discern what it was if you already knew.

It was Dunkin’ Donuts. The same one I’d bought Hux the donuts from that day.

That’s all it took. I was back there, on that warm afternoon, horsing around with Hux outside the house. Watching him climb the steps one by one—

Someone hammered on the window.

I snapped round to face them, every muscle tense in an instant, and a sweat breaking out across my body just as it had that day. My heart was hammering, my breath tight—

It was the jeweler. His expression was changing from annoyance to...fear?

I took a breath. “Sorry. Don’t creep up on me.”

He was backing away across the sidewalk, shaking his head.

“What?” I asked. No response. “
What?”
Jesus, he was really overreacting. All I’d done was look round and glare at him.

The jeweler tripped and went down on his ass. He started scrambling backward toward his shop, feeling for the door. His face was white.

I realized he wasn’t looking at my face. His gaze was lower.

I looked down. I had my gun pointed right at him. I hadn’t even been aware of drawing it.

You asshole,
said Hux in my head.

***

An hour later, I was studying the carpet in my captain’s office. Every time he yelled—which was a lot—it flattened the hair on the top of my head. An instant later, the windows behind me would rattle.

“I have the
commissioner,”
Captain Barnes was yelling, “
up my ass
about complaints against the department. I have the
mayor up my ass
about our relationship with the community. I have an internal affairs guy asking questions about the fitness of officers to serve—do you know where
he
is?”

“Up your ass, sir,” I said dutifully.

“And then
you,
Kowalski, you pull this shit that has
all three
of them yelling at me. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be yelled at?” he yelled.

“No, sir.”

“No!” He leaned over to his office door, flung it wide, and yelled, “Because I mollycoddle the whole lot of you!”

Everyone looked up for a moment and then returned to their work. This sort of thing was normal for Barnes. Everyone accepted his shouting because, usually, he had our best interests at heart. He was tough but fair and sat like a fatherly shield between us and the truly terrifying layers of bureaucracy above us, absorbing the worst of it.

He slammed the door and slumped back into his chair. “Do you hate me?” he asked. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack? Is that it?”

“No sir.”

“Do you want to go back to psych? I can send you back to Doctor Fuller, and she can show you ink blots and talk to you about your mother. Would that help?”

“No sir.”

“Then in the name of God, Kowalski,
what am I meant to do with you?!
You pulled a gun on a guy!”

“He surprised me.”

“What are you gonna do when someone gets in a fender bender with you? Blow up their car?”

I took a deep breath. “It was a one-time thing, sir. Won’t happen again.”

Captain Barnes sat back in his chair and his voice softened. “Look...I liked him too, kid.”

“It’s not about Hux.”

“The hell it isn’t. How many suspects have you yelled at? How many times have you been late for duty, since it happened? Are you sleeping...
at all?

I winced. I
had
lost my cool and yelled at suspects a few times, but I hadn’t known that it had gotten back to the captain. And yes, I’d lain awake until four or five in the morning and then missed roll call more than once.

Barnes took a long breath. “This is your last chance,” he told me. “Final warning. Mess up again, you’re gone. Are you hearing me?”

I nodded. I heard him. I just had no idea how to fix myself.