Officer in Pursuit (21 page)

There was nothing more disgusting than
a coward like this, an insignificant nothing of a human being who
demonstrated his complete worthlessness by abusing and tormenting
people who died before they figured out how to escape the cycle of
being used as a punching bag.

“Shut up,” Grey said as the man
protested being cuffed and howled about the burn in his eyes.
“You’re even stupider than you look if you thought you could win
that fight. You’re lucky to be alive.”

Not surprisingly, the smaller man had
come out on the worse end of the fight. His nose was crooked and
one eye was already black, while the larger man looked fine, save
for the inflammation and redness caused by the pepper
spray.

Liam caught Grey’s eyes and held his
gaze as he pulled the larger man, now restrained, to his
feet.

Grey didn’t say anything else as the
noise faded to a dull roar and they escorted the two men away,
depriving the other inmates of their entertainment.

Later, when he and Liam headed to the
break room after rinsing their faces for ten minutes straight, he
didn’t have an appetite and had to force down his lunch. For once,
he wasn’t jealous of Henry’s gourmet food. He couldn’t even think
of a good comeback when Henry looked at his and Liam’s red, puffy
eyes and asked them if they’d been watching the Lifetime Channel
with the inmates.

All he could think about was that
piece of shit who’d slaughtered two women plus his own unborn child
and then thrown out their bodies. And who, after all that, had the
audacity to whine because he’d been pepper sprayed.

Someone like that had hurt Kerry. The
fight had brought that reality to the surface of his mind, along
with other unbearable truths. As he ate, he thought of her, and he
thought of his mom, gone now for the better part of twenty
years.

And he felt so angry that he longed to
rip someone apart, make them pay.

The worst part was, he knew that even
if he could do that, nothing would change. What had been done to
Kerry, his mother – even him, as a child – was done.

CHAPTER 16

“I said open your damn
eyes!”

Kerry braced herself against the cheap
polyester bedspread and tried to comprehend how this – Brad looming
over her, God only knew how drunk, and her cheek stinging from his
hand – had become her reality.

She didn’t understand, but she knew it
wasn’t a dream. On the contrary: it was as if, after three years,
the other shoe had finally fallen. It was terrifying, but it didn’t
feel wrong. It felt terribly familiar.

Had she really changed at
all?

As she looked into Brad’s eyes, she
tried hard to summon up enough outrage to overcome her paralyzing
fear.

“What do you have to say for
yourself?” He made the demand over and over.

She figured she had two options. She
could tell him she didn’t owe him an explanation, that she’d been
entitled to take every action she had and that it was none of his
business. Or she could pander to his asinine urges, his sense of
entitlement. She knew how his brain worked and the thought of
trying to appease him crossed her mind, an old habit that filled
her with shame now.

She wouldn’t do it. Even if she’d been
willing, it wouldn’t have saved her anyway. She’d learned that
lesson time and time again, had finally left him when she’d grasped
the reality of it.

There was nothing she could do to
diminish his anger, not when he was like this.

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”
She pushed herself up into a sitting position, bracing herself to
be knocked back down.

His face was red; now it turned
blotchy with pale patches, like his anger was so absolute it
threatened to rend him colorless.

It felt like she was back in their
house in Kentucky. She could almost see it: the aging 1960’s ranch
with its kitchen dated by yellowing Formica and linoleum, its faded
carpets and scratched hardwoods. She recalled the smell of the
place, a combination of heating fuel and dampness, underlaid by
whiskey and always with a certain staleness that reflected the way
her life had stagnated within those walls.

She’d hated that house, and hated
remembering it so clearly now, feeling as if she might at any
moment find herself standing at the sink in the dated kitchen,
soaking soda and whiskey rings out of the bottoms of
glasses.

“You slut! You were always a slut!”
Brad was as eloquent as always. “I saw you with that son of a bitch
back in North Carolina!”

Back in North Carolina?
Where
were
they?
Kerry’s frayed nerves unraveled a little more. She looked toward
the window, but the curtains were drawn.

“It’s none of your business! Nothing I
do is any of your business. We’re not married!”

He shook his head, the motion
exaggerated, his eyes ticking ever so slightly from side to side in
the telltale fashion of a drunk. “You think you can just run away?
You think you can humiliate me like that and go and live the rest
of your damned life by the beach – you think it’s that
easy?”

No, it had never been easy.
But
this
was why
she’d done it, why she didn’t regret it.

At least she’d had three years of
freedom. And two days of getting to experience, for once, what it
would be like to be a regular person – one whose choices were her
own, who might find happiness, if she looked hard
enough.

The thought of her time with Grey made
her heart swell and her eyes sting. It’d been stupid to think she
could get away with it for long – she saw that now. But she didn’t
regret it. It’d been good while it’d lasted, good to have a taste
of what her life might’ve been like if her path hadn’t been set
years ago by a series of bad decisions.

Brad grabbed her by her upper arm and
yanked her up off the bed.

Hanging in the air, she struggled to
touch the floor with her toes, to take the stress off her shoulder,
which ached in protest.

“Let go of me!” She looked toward the
motel room door and saw that he’d tilted a chair against it,
wedging the top beneath the doorknob so no one could enter, even if
they had a key.

He shoved her up against the wall and
leaned down, his breath streaming over her face. “You listen here,
bitch. You’re mine, and you’re coming back to Kentucky where you
belong. You’ve got every last damn day of your life to think about
what you’ve done and convince me you’re sorry.”

He still had ahold of her arm, and she
could feel it bruising. She considered hitting him in the face with
her other elbow, maybe jabbing at an eye. But he was big and drunk
and despite her fear, she wasn’t completely delusional. If she
fought him and did anything less than debilitating damage, he’d pay
her back tenfold, maybe even kill her.

She needed to be smart. God, she
needed to be, but she was shaking, and everything hurt. She
remembered now that she’d wrecked her car. Had he run her off the
road in his vehicle?

She couldn’t remember.

“If I don’t think you’re sorry, I’ll
make you sorry,” he said. “And guess what? I can tell you’re not
fucking sorry. Not yet.”

He drew back the arm he wasn’t holding
her against the wall with, and for the first time, she noticed that
he was holding a whiskey bottle.

She closed her eyes in reflex when he
swung it at her head, and even though she’d known for years what he
was capable of and had run away because of it, she was shocked that
everything was ending so quickly, over so soon.

* * * * *

Grey had never been so glad to get out
of uniform, and it had nothing to do with Kerry. Or rather, it had
a lot to do with her, but not in the sense it had the day before,
when he’d put on a clean uniform just for her, just so she could
watch him take it off.

After the fight, he’d spent the rest
of the day at work feeling off. Shitty. More or less hating his
job.

He was home now, stuffing his shirt
into the laundry hamper, throwing his pants in after it. His skin
still burnt faintly from the pepper spray exposure – he’d have to
warn Kerry, be careful with how he touched her. The stuff could
easily rub off on another person.

The thought was depressing. How the
hell was he supposed to avoid touching her after the couple of days
they’d just had? Everything between them was new and fresh and just
begging to be taken further, hashed out in bed over and over
again.

He got hard just thinking about her;
even his shitty day and bad mood couldn’t stop that
reaction.

He made himself take a long shower,
unable to help thinking how ironic it was that thanks to the pepper
spray, he didn’t dare touch his dick, couldn’t take the edge off to
make it easier not to put his hands all over Kerry as soon as he
saw her.

Once he’d put on jeans and a t-shirt,
he headed for her place, like he’d promised to that morning, after
they’d woken up together.

* * * * *

The bottle hit the wall and shattered,
glass and whiskey spraying everywhere like a flower blooming at
warp-speed, its sharp, wet petals slicing through the
air.

Brad was left with his fist curled
around the handle, two thirds of the bottle soaking into the carpet
at his feet. It hit him, then, what he’d just lost: the better part
of a bottle of perfectly good whiskey.

Perfectly good whiskey she’d made him
waste.

He shook her by her skinny little
shoulder. “See what you’ve done?”

She didn’t apologize. Of fucking
course she didn’t. She’d been running wild for three years and
obviously thought she could get away with anything, keep on
disrespecting him, as if leaving him hadn’t been bad
enough.

On top of that, there was the guy
she’d been fucking. There were probably more he didn’t know about.
And now the whiskey.

“Say you’re sorry.”

He didn’t know why he was doing it,
but he was giving her one more chance. One more chance to
apologize, beg him for mercy before he started giving her what she
deserved. Maybe if she begged hard enough he’d take it a little
easier on her.

Either way, she still needed to be
taught a lesson. Three years’ worth of lessons.

As he watched the woman
he’d laid claim to nearly a decade ago in front of God and
everyone, he thought of the house and how she’d left it: filthy,
filled with stacks of dirty dishes, the trash reeking in a corner
of the kitchen. She’d run off to her parents’ and hadn’t even left
him so much as a note, just the big
fuck
you
that was the empty, dirty
house.

And then had come the months of her
whoring around town like she didn’t owe him anything, holing up at
her ma and daddy’s like she didn’t have a fucking care in the
world.

Then the papers she’d sent to him, the
ones he’d thrown in the trash over and over, stuffed into her
daddy’s mailbox along with their stupid cat.

Then the court, and the divorce – the
piece of goddamn paper she liked to pretend cancelled out
everything she’d sworn to, right in church.

Goddamn, she made him mad, but she was
his. He’d take her back – he’d drag her back if he had to. He
wasn’t about to let what was his go whoring around any longer,
dragging his name through the dirt.

She’d say she was sorry. And
eventually, she really would be, would wish with everything she had
that she’d never left him. That she’d been a good wife, like she’d
promised to be.

“L-let me go, Brad! Now! Ungh!” She
tried to twist away from him, but she was weak as a newborn
kitten.

There was nothing funny about what
she’d done, but he laughed at her trying to get away from him,
slapping his arm like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

“Shut up now,” he said when he was
tired of watching her make an ass of herself. “Shut the fuck up and
listen. You’re going to pay for what you’ve done – every day you’ve
spent away from me, neglecting your duties as my wife. Every dollar
you took from me when you left and every man you’ve ever fucked
that wasn’t me.

“But when it’s done, when you’re good
and sorry and I know you’ll never even think of running away again,
I’m gonna give you another chance. Let you live in my house and
sleep in my bed. Maybe if you’re good, I’ll even let you have
another baby.”

She stopped hitting him, stopped
trying to twist away. Maybe she’d realized what a weakling she was
– what a man he was – or maybe it was talking about the baby that’d
shut her up. It’d always done that; mentioning it was like slapping
her without having to lift a hand. It was nice.

“You’ll have to get on my good side
though Kerry, and you’d better start trying now, because you’ve got
a hell of a lot to make up for, and it ain’t gonna be
easy.”

* * * * *

Bile burnt in Kerry’s throat, hot and
sour. Brad’s breath reeked unbelievably, and then there was what
he’d actually said…