Officer in Pursuit (20 page)

“Actually,” she said, “I’ll make you a
deal – I’ll wear a costume if you help me out at the event. Not a
corset and stockings, but something. We need volunteers to help run
the game booths. I’m running the cider stand and I bet I can get
Faye to let you work a booth near mine.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it – you’re just going to
agree?”

“Why not? I don’t have any plans for
Halloween. I think I work that day, but my evening is
free.”

“Okay. Thanks. It’ll be more fun to
work the event if you’re there.”

“Damn right it will. Maybe afterward
we can go through the haunted house next door.”

“No way. I wouldn’t sleep for a
month.”

“All right then – we’ll sit around on
the mansion lawn and sip cider like the classy people we are. And
afterwards, when I get you back to my place, I’ll unlace your
corset.”

“Ha. Whatever you say. Just don’t be
disappointed when I show up dressed as a cat or something like
that.”

He was halfway done with switching out
the tires now. Halfway done and halfway hard, thinking about her in
a corset and stockings. Maybe he could get her to wear something
like that in the bedroom, sometime.

“I have an idea,” he said. “No, a
dare: I’ll let you choose my costume if I get to choose yours.
Anything you want, I’ll wear it.”

She laughed. “I don’t think so.
Besides, I’d rather see you in your uniform than a costume any
day.”

“Really? If I’d known that, I would’ve
made it a point to coincidentally let you see me in uniform as
often as possible.”

“You could show me now.”

He almost dropped his
wrench.

* * * * *

Monday morning was chilled by rain and
fog that left the world awash in shades of grey, nothing like the
sunny day before, which Kerry had spent with Grey. Somehow, that
seemed appropriate.

After changing out her tires, he’d
stayed at her house, first for a movie and then for dinner, and
ultimately for the night.

It’d been amazing. They
hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other, and his
staying over had felt natural – not like a favor he’d done to ease
her fear. He
had
eased her fear, but that hadn’t been why he’d
stayed.

Remembering their night together had
her buzzing with pleasure now as she pulled out of her driveway,
headed for work. Grey had already gone, but before he’d left, she’d
finished her morning coffee in a uniform-induced daze, fighting the
urge to drool.

God, he looked good in uniform. She’d
rarely had the opportunity to see him in it up until now – whenever
they’d hung out in a group, he had of course worn his regular
clothing. The sight of him decked out in dark blue this morning had
her longing for that evening, when she’d see him again.

She’d made him promise to come visit
then, to wear a uniform.

She grinned at the thought, not caring
that she probably looked like a crazy person driving down the road,
smiling to herself. All she had to do was get through the day –
work, plus meeting Jeremy at the courthouse during her lunch break
to fill out the paperwork for that temporary protective order – and
Grey would be all hers again.

A brief scare wiped the smile right
off her face when she tried to stop at a sign and hit a puddle,
hydroplaning instead.

It took her twice as long as usual to
slow down. Thank God, no one had been coming on the other road,
which lead directly into town. She slid through the intersection
with a speeding heart and a curse, but wasn’t harmed.

With the rain still pouring down, she
was glad to make it onto the rural road that wound through the
county and led to Wisteria.

She was about a half mile from her
house when she got to the familiar stretch where the road began to
wind, skirting around the edge of a pine forest. The rain was
pelting against her windshield in earnest, and she had the wipers
on full blast. The radio was difficult to hear over the roar of
water against glass, so she turned the knob, cranking the
volume.

No sooner had she filled the car with
the sound of her favorite station’s morning nineties hour than she
realized that something was absolutely, terribly wrong.

She was going around the long curve,
but she was going too fast. Tires spinning against slick asphalt,
she was accelerating when she should’ve been slowing. Pumping her
foot against the brake pedal had no effect.

The car fishtailed, lost traction and
went careening first to one side, then the other. When she hit the
ditch at the edge of the road, she felt the impact in every bone,
every tooth as she was pitched forward and brutally restrained by
her seatbelt.

It was as if someone had picked up the
entire earth and thrown it down against concrete like an enormous
bouncy ball. Everything blurred and shook around her and in her;
even her thoughts were shaken loose from her mind, lost.

Then the blur became nothing but
darkness.

* * * * *

The rain poured down fit to drown the
whole world, lashing Brad’s shoulders as he walked, plastering his
shirt to his body. It was cold, too cold for the tropical paradise
Kerry had probably thought she’d been running off to when she’d
left Kentucky.

He paid no mind to the water sloshing
in his boots as he walked toward the little silver car with one
pair of wheels in the ditch and the other a couple feet in the air.
It was the same Toyota she’d left in, the same piece of shit he’d
found in her driveway and slashed the tires on.

He pried open the driver’s side door
and looked down at his wife for the first time in three
years.

She’d gotten skinny and her hair was
longer than he remembered. There was blood on her face. But it was
definitely her.

She wasn’t moving, but he could see
her breathing. She’d had a little jolt, that was all. If she was
lucky, it’d knocked some goddamned sense into her head.

He unbuckled her seatbelt and pulled
her out of the car. She weighed nothing at all, and he laid her
over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried her to his
truck.

Even in the rain, he could tell what
she smelled like. Shampoo and soap – soap that hadn’t scrubbed away
the scent of that bastard he’d seen her with, the one she’d been
fucking. Humiliating him with.

He threw her into the backseat, rough.
There’d be no more of her screwing around on him. No more three
year beach vacations, no more of this shit at all.

For a few seconds, he just stood on
the pavement, still getting rained on, and looked at her. He’d been
waiting for this moment for so long, but it didn’t feel as good as
he’d imagined. It didn’t feel like the victory it was.

Probably because she’d been fucking
that bastard the night before. The son of a bitch had been parked
at her house all night. Brad had wanted to cut his break lines too,
but he’d done Kerry’s first and then one of her nosy goddamned
neighbors just up the road had flipped on a porch light and come
outside in her bathrobe, gawking around in the dark and clutching
her phone.

Getting his wife back had been all
Brad had thought about for the past three years, and so he’d gone
before the police could show up again. He’d worry about the guy
she’d been fucking later – for now, he just needed to get her out
of here.

He had some bungee cords under the
seat she was lying on. Pulling them out, he wrapped one tight
around her wrists. Last thing he needed was for her to wake up and
try to jump out of the truck or something.

When he hit the lock and started
driving, she was still out.

* * * * *

Kerry awoke to the noise of a football
game. The sound quality was bad and the commentators’ remarks were
mixed with static.

Her head hurt. Her arms, too.
Everything was cramping.

She felt sleep preying on her, lurking
in the fuzzy corners of her mind. A part of her wanted to give in,
but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly
wrong, and that kept her awake.

“You’re up.” A voice shattered the
static and noise, and a hand clamped down on her
shoulder.

Everything inside Kerry wrenched with
fear. She knew that voice, even if she didn’t know what was
happening. It was like something out of a nightmare, one
recurrences had burnt into her memory, clear as crystal.

“’
Bout damn time.” The hand
– Brad’s hand – tightened.

Next thing she knew her head was
spinning. She was screaming and—

Something hit her face with
stunning force, the sharp
smack
echoing like the crack of a whip.

Brad’s hand.

He towered over her, looking almost
exactly like he had last time she’d seen him, years ago.

She lay on her back in a shabby room.
The light fixtures and bad paintings said that it was a motel room.
There was also a ‘no smoking’ plaque beside the TV, although the
smell of the room said that it had been ignored a hundred times
over.

“Look at me, goddamn it. Look at
me.”

She couldn’t help but look, even
though she didn’t want to, didn’t want to believe this was real. If
it hadn’t been for the ache in her jaw – the double sting of pain
and humiliation – she wouldn’t have believed any of it
was.

His face was covered in a couple
weeks’ worth of hair growth, almost enough to be called a
full-fledged beard. The hair was tawny-colored and his eyes were
hazel, but not warm. Tiny, broken capillaries showed that he hadn’t
stopped drinking. His reeking breath confirmed it when he leaned in
and over her, putting his face in front of hers.

The mattress groaned beneath her as he
braced himself with an arm against its surface. “I found you,
Kerry. What do you have to say for yourself? What do you have to
fucking say?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to
shut him out, but that was a mistake.

He grabbed her by the jaw and forced
her to face him. “Open your fucking eyes.”

* * * * *

Prison life was monotonous. Inmate
fights broke that monotony up. That was why dozens of E Block
inmates were roaring – they liked to watch, even if they didn’t
have a stake in the outcome. It was entertainment.

Grey and Liam were the first to reach
the fight – the two men were already on the ground. Liam’s voice
barely rose above the roar of dozens of prisoners as he told them
to stop.

Of course, they didn’t.

Grey freed his pepper spray from his
duty belt and sprayed it over the two tangled inmates.

He hated using this shit, but at least
the other inmates gave them a wide berth.

Screams came from the floor, half
angry and half agonized.

Three other officers arrived as Liam
and Grey pulled the two men apart.

“Shit.” Liam grimaced as the cloud hit
them too and the stuff they’d just sprayed on the prisoners got on
their hands.

Pepper spray was usually the safest
way to stop a fight, but you couldn’t use it in a situation like
this without making yourself miserable too.

The fight had gone out of both
inmates. There was a lot of swearing, but it was mostly because of
the pepper spray. Through watering eyes, Grey saw just how
mismatched the fight had been.

The guy he had ahold of was wiry,
almost scrawny. The inmate Liam was handling had curled into what
Grey estimated to be a 230 pound ball of muscle and involuntary
tears. They were both white, except for where they were the color
of prison tattoo ink, an indiscernible, faded shade of blue-grey.
One was bald while the other held onto a failing mullet/buzz cut
hybrid.

Their physical descriptions could’ve
applied to any of dozens of other inmates in the facility, but Grey
recognized one of them in particular – the smaller one with the
travesty of a haircut.

Grey actually knew something about his
criminal record, which was knowledge he generally tried to avoid.
Some officers liked knowing what various inmates had done to land
in prison and looked it up in the system, but Grey figured that
since he had to do his job the same anyway, it didn’t matter. All
knowing did was make him mad.

Like right now. One of the other
officers had mentioned this particular piece of shit’s history to
him a few weeks ago, when he’d been processed into general
population. He’d beaten his wife and his pregnant girlfriend both
to death and thrown their bodies off a bridge together, or
something like that. Apparently the story had been on the
news.

Now, he sagged in Grey’s grip, wailing
like a big, ugly baby and not even putting up a fight, utterly
defeated by pepper spray.

Grey’s anger was as sudden as it was
deep and bitter. Over the course of the past seven years he’d
become pretty good at not letting the inmates get the best of his
temper, but at that moment, he felt nothing but overwhelming
disgust and barely-restrained rage. And he couldn’t help but think
that if he had to touch such a vile piece of human garbage, he
might as well be knocking the guy’s meth-ravaged teeth
out.