Father Christmas (27 page)

“
Not quite.” His face was
so close to hers, it took vast amounts of willpower not to lean
forward and kiss him. “I told you, I’m practically a nun. I
wouldn’t know how to run this particular show, even if I wanted
to.”

“
You’re the sexiest nun
I’ve ever known.” He kissed her tenderly and leaned back. It wasn’t
a passionate kiss, but it was enough to make Molly feel like the
exact opposite of a nun.

She studied his face in
the dim light of the bedside lamp. He looked solemn in spite of his
smile.
It’s been a while,
he’d
said. Was she the first woman he’d been with since his wife had
left?

And how in heaven’s name could a woman leave
a man who made love the way John did?

“
Why did she leave you?”
she blurted out, then clapped her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry.
It’s none of my business. Forget I asked.”

“
It’s all right.” He
stroked her hair again, tucking it behind her ear. “She left me
because she didn’t love me.”

“
That’s the part I’m
having trouble with,” Molly said, figuring that since he hadn’t
kicked her out of his bed for being too nosy, or at the very least
changed the subject, he must not mind talking about it. “She
married you. She had a child with you. She must have loved you at
some point.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “I don’t think so.”
He ran his hand through her hair again while he collected his
thoughts. “We were dating, and we were careless, and she got
pregnant. She wanted an abortion, but I begged her not to do that.
I told her I’d marry her and we’d raise the baby together. I was
persuasive.” He paused for a minute, lost in thought. “It was never
what she wanted.”

Molly appreciated that he’d told her so
much. But there was something missing, some flaw in his logic.
Perhaps he’d been persuasive, perhaps his wife hadn’t wanted
marriage or a baby. But he was such a good man. If he could
persuade her to marry him and become a mother, why couldn’t he have
persuaded her to stay with him?

He must have guessed her thoughts. “It
wasn’t what I wanted, either. We didn’t marry out of love. I wasn’t
a good husband.”

“
You’re the most
responsible person I’ve ever met. How could you not be a good
husband?”

The soothing pattern of his fingers through
her hair would have lulled her into a trance if the conversation
hadn’t been so important to her. He sifted his words as his hand
sifted her hair. “I was wrapped up in my work,” he finally said. “I
lived for it. I took the hardest cases, put in the longest hours. I
was single-minded and aggressive. I was going to be the best damned
cop in Arlington. In the world.” He sighed. “I wasn’t what she
needed. I didn’t do my share with Mike. She got stuck doing the
hard stuff—the diapers, the feedings—while I was putting in the
time and earning my shield. When I was home, my mind wasn’t with
her. It was on whatever case I was working.” His hand went still
and he stared directly into her eyes. “Cops don’t make good
husbands.”

“
That’s ridiculous,” she
argued, but she sounded less than certain. For ten years she’d
listened to Gail rant about cops, their hunger for power, their
arrogance, their disregard for justice, their lack of compassion.
Maybe cops made bad husbands because their work was so demanding
and so violent, but... No. She simply didn’t want to believe John’s
assertion was true.

She didn’t want to believe it because she
was in love with him.

She didn’t want to let him believe it,
either. She was going to prove to this fine, honest, brave man that
he was capable of anything: being a good father, being a wonderful
lover—being the best cop in the world, if that was what he wanted.
John could do it all.

If only she could convince him of it.

If only she could absolutely, without a
doubt, convince herself.

AT NINE-THIRTY Monday morning, John swung
into the glass-enclosed office overlooking the squad room and said,
“I want to get back to work.”

Coffey looked up from the stack of memos on
his blotter. Squinting slightly, he scrutinized the tall, intense
detective standing on the opposite side of his desk. John still had
on his jacket; the morning’s chilly air clung to him. He hadn’t
paused to admire the Christmas tree in the lobby downstairs, or to
shoot the breeze with the cops loitering in the squad room. He’d
marched directly into Coffey’s office, prepared to make
demands.

Before coming to work, he’d spent a half
hour with his doctor, having his stitches and butterfly-clips
removed and his wounds examined. Before that, he’d dropped Mike off
at the Children’s Garden, where he’d seen Molly.

Just thinking about the two minutes they’d
shared in the preschool’s entry made him grin. With other parents
coming and going, he and Molly hadn’t had the privacy he would have
liked, but perhaps that was just as well. If they’d had privacy, he
would have kissed her. And once he’d kissed her, he would have
wanted to do a hell of a lot more. Only the swarm of parents kept
him from ravishing her right there.

Coffey remained seated at his desk, but
didn’t motion John to sit in one of the chairs facing him. “What
did your doctor say?” he asked, eyeing John skeptically.

“
He said I was fine.”
Actually, he’d said John was healing well, which wasn’t quite the
same thing. But the doctor had only examined John’s arm and his
hand. He’d had no idea about how good the rest of John was
feeling.

Molly
. All he had to do was close his eyes and think about the way
he’d held her, touched her, made love to her...and he felt as
strong and spirited as a stallion. A couple of knife wounds were
irrelevant.

“
I don’t want to do Santa,
either,” he added, feeling bold. “I want real work, Coffey. I want
a case.”

“
I don’t know.” Coffey
pressed his hands together as if he was going to pray, and gave
John a patronizing smile. “The Santa stint worked well. You got a
lot of collars. And we know from experience that it was high-risk
work. You’ve made a success of it, Russo—”

“
You put me in a Santa
suit because you thought I was stressed out,” John reminded him.
“Well, I’m not stressed out. I want real work.”

“
Undercover Santa wasn’t
real work?”

“
No.” It was, but John
wasn’t going to win Coffey over by agreeing with him about
that.

Coffey had assigned John to the Santa gig
because he’d believed John was overwhelmed by the finality of his
divorce and his child-care crisis. If John wanted to get put on a
case, all he had to do was persuade Coffey that neither of those
issues was in play anymore. Thanks to Molly, they weren’t.

But he wasn’t ready to discuss her, not yet.
He wasn’t ready to tell Coffey about the woman who had helped him
to understand his son, who had entered his house and transformed it
into a home with her mere presence, who had spent the weekend with
him, shopping, shooting the breeze, making him feel comfortable
enough to talk about himself. He wasn’t ready to describe the woman
who had spent the night in his arms, so soft and lovely the next
morning that he’d been aroused before he’d been awake. They’d made
love again in the muted dawn light, warm and dreamy. They’d
conquered worlds together. They’d glimpsed heaven. They’d become a
part of each other.

He could do anything now—run investigations,
chase criminals, direct traffic, hold press conferences—anything
except talk about Molly. That part of his life was too new.

“
Trust me, Coffey,” he
said, trying not to beg. “Let me take a case. I’m
ready.”

Coffey looked dubious. But before he could
speak, Bud Schaefer leaned in through the open doorway. “Coffey?
I’ve got a shooting at a bar down on East Fifteenth. There’s
already some uniforms there. Who should I take with me?”

John knew Coffey wouldn’t let Bud work the
case by himself. Nobody went solo on a shooting. “I’ll go,” he
volunteered, starting toward the door.

“
Russo—”

“
He’ll be primary. I’m
just backing him up.”

“
What kind of back-up can
you be?”

John held up his right hand, displaying the
flat strip of adhesive with which the doctor had replaced the
immobilizing wad of bandaging. He wiggled his fingers to show his
dexterity. “I can do it.”

Still doubtful, Coffey glanced toward Bud.
“You want him partnering you?”

“
If he says he can do it,
he can.”

Coffey turned back to John and shrugged.
“All right. Keep me updated. And don’t take any chances. The
holidays always bring out the worst in people.”

Anxious to get away from Coffey before he
changed his mind, John strode out of the office ahead of Bud. He
slowed as he neared the squad room door, and checked his gun to
make sure it was loaded. Tucking it back into the holster beneath
his jacket, he waited for Bud to grab his cell phone. They left the
squad room together.

Light flurries swirled through the air as
they crossed the lot and climbed into one of the pool cars. Bud
took the wheel and John settled into the passenger seat. The smell
of the car pleased John. All the pool cars had a similar smell, a
mix of stale cigarette smoke and coffee and doughnuts spiced with a
whiff of motor oil. John welcomed the distinctive fragrance. It
confirmed that he wasn’t playing undercover Santa anymore.

“
So, what happened?” Bud
asked as he steered out of the lot.

“
I told Coffey I wanted to
get put on a case.”

“
No. I mean, this
weekend.”

John shot him a quizzical look. “What do you
mean?”

“
Something happened this
weekend, Russo. You’re a changed man.”

It was John’s habit to keep his private
business private. But Bud had known him long enough to be able to
read him. He considered refusing to respond to Bud’s prying, but
Bud might be insulted if he didn’t toss him a scrap. “Mike and I
did some Christmas shopping,” he said. “We trimmed the tree. It
looks good.”

“
You trimmed the tree?”
Bud snorted. “Come on. This is me you’re talking to. Tell me what’s
going on.”

“
We did trim the tree,”
John said, then relented. “Molly helped us.”

Bud nodded, as if he’d known all along that
Molly was the reason for John’s spirits. “Hey, I think it’s great.
She’s cute, she’s a teacher, she works with kids. She’s kind of on
the short side, but nobody’s perfect.” He braked to a stop at a red
light. There was no need to blast the siren and run traffic lights.
Whatever had gone down in the bar was past tense; uniformed
officers were already at the scene, and John and Bud had no cause
for high-risk speeding.

“
So,” Bud probed, “what
does Mike think of her?”

The question made John uncomfortable. He
didn’t want to admit that part of Molly’s appeal was her rapport
with Mike. If John thought of her in relation to Mike, he’d think
of her in the role of a step-mother, and if he did that he’d of her
in the role of a wife. He couldn’t let himself do that, not when he
had so many misgivings about himself in the role of a husband.

He forced a smile. “At this point, it’s too
soon to matter what Mike thinks.”

“
Well, whatever else got
trimmed besides that tree—” Bud glanced conspicuously at John’s
crotch “—it’s done wonders for you.”

John didn’t consider that remark worth
acknowledging.

Bud lost his smirk. “If she’s good for you,
hang onto her,” he advised. “I’m your partner, and I like you
better when you’re happy.”

“
I’m not happy,” John
argued, just to be contrary.

A block ahead of them, they saw several
black-and-whites parked in front of a bar, with a few onlookers
milling around the sidewalk outside the door. “Who goes to a bar
this early on a Monday morning?” Bud wondered out loud. “It’s too
early for people to be getting drunk and blowing each other’s
brains out.”

“
Let’s find out what
happened,” John said, shoving out of the car as soon as Bud turned
off the engine.

What happened, they learned after talking to
the uniformed officers and interviewing the pale, trembling woman
who owned the bar, was that she and the victim, a fellow she
identified as Alvin Hampton, were setting up the bar for its
ten-thirty opening, when a woman barged in, screamed, “I’m gonna
kill you, Alvin!” and shot him in the thigh. He had already been
taken to Arlington Memorial, but one of the EMT’s heard him mumble
the name “Sheila.” At first, the bar owner insisted that she had no
idea who Sheila was, but eventually her memory sharpened enough for
her to recall that the shooter just might have been Alvin’s wife,
Sheila Hampton. A bit more prodding, and the bar owner also
recollected that she and Alvin had been having an affair for three
months.

John and Bud got Alvin’s home address from
the bartender and drove to the modest apartment building, where
they found Sheila Hampton. She was thin, with disproportionately
large hands and an odd shade of red hair with black roots along her
scalp. When Bud told her he was going to bring her to the station
for questioning, she insisted she’d done nothing wrong, but she
left the apartment peacefully with them, locking the door behind
her before John could see any farther into it than the front foyer.
He and Bud were going to have to get a search warrant. He’d bet a
week’s salary there was a gun somewhere inside that apartment.