Uncommon Passion (14 page)

appearance of a dominatrix anime elf. She turned and looked right at Ben, and with a shock he realized he’d

gone home with her three, no four, months ago. Her hair had been jet black then, worn sleek and short,

making her a dead ringer for Carrie-Anne Moss in the
Matrix
movies. He’d always had a thing for Trinity.

She lifted an eyebrow at him in greeting, then went back to her phone.

The rules weren’t complicated, but he’d never really thought about how much of his sex life depended

on the woman going along with them, thereby making things so much easier for everyone involved. No

harm, no foul in the full-contact sport of hookup sex, but sleeping with Rachel brought them into stark

relief

“Juliette asked about you last weekend,” Steve said.

Ben said nothing.

“Who you were seeing, or at least fucking. Was it serious? That kind of thing. I told her I had no idea.

Because I don’t. Three years we’ve been standing outside the club twelve hours a weekend and I can’t

name a single girl you’ve dated.”

Because he didn’t date. “You complaining?”

“Just stating a fact. Juliette said she liked the strong, silent type, so you’re welcome.”

Ben stayed focused on the line. “Who helped her get over the disappointment?”

“No one,” Steve said.

Ben cut him a look.

“No lie,” Steve said. “I offered, Carl offered, but she stayed at Tina’s. Slept on the couch.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I fucked Tina and Juliette was asleep on the couch when I left.”

“You slept with Tina after Juliette turned you down?” Ben said.

“She said she had a condom in her bedroom with my name on it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ben said. He tried to imagine Rachel announcing she had a condom with his name on it,

and failed. “You were with the State Patrol, right?”

“Gave back four years in pension when I left,” Steve confirmed.

“Ever catch a call out at Elysian Fields?”

“Yeah,” Steve said without looking up from his phone.

“And?”

Steve transferred his attention from his phone to the line. “What are we calling a group of like-minded

isolationists these days? A cult? A commune? A community? They’ve withdrawn from the sinful world.

Thirty years ago a bunch of families bought land together and started farming. Subsistence stuff, mostly.

Eventually the world caught up with them and got interested in organic meat, milk, products like that. They

homeschool the kids, who tend to marry other kids from similar communities in the South. Big extended

families. Women dress in those long skirts and long-sleeved shirts, or ugly dresses. Men run the

households, the Church, the businesses. Women cook and clean and do chores and have babies. Lots and

lots and lots of babies. I’ve never seen so many kids in one place in my life.” He looked back at his phone.

“Calls were petty theft, mostly. Vandalism. Kids from the local school used to spray-paint gigantic cocks on

the barns. That kind of thing.”

“Abuse? Drugs? Drinking?”

“Sure on the drugs and drinking, but usually kids and they usually wanted to handle it internally.

Abuse . . .” He looked at Ben. “Physical, probably. Nothing we got called on or saw when we were there.

Emotional and mental? Depends on whether you call indoctrinating people with a systemic theology that

justifies your position in the world and sending your kids to special camps for extra discipline
abuse
.

Why?”

“The woman from the auction used to live there.”

Steve whistled. “She got out?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those women, they’re under the men’s thumbs. No real high school, no college. No jobs except as

relates to the farm. They’re raised to be obedient wives and mothers. Most of them don’t have access to

money. They don’t talk back, they don’t question the men.”

She’d gotten out. People assumed virgin meant weak, naïve, insecure, even ashamed. Not Rachel. She

was aware, thinking about what she did and why she did it, and strong enough to ask questions, plan,

execute a course of action that left her alone in the world. She’d be easy to teach, easy to toughen up and

prepare for casual sex in the modern world.

The thought process left him edgy.

His phone rang. He pulled it from his cargo pants pocket; his heart rate shot up when the number for

dispatch flashed on the screen. “Harris.”

The dispatcher, her voice several notches higher than usual, read off an address. “I’m ten minutes

away,” Ben told her before hanging up.

Steve knew what the call meant. “I’ve got this. Go.”

Ben sprinted for his truck. Flashing lights guided him to the scene from blocks away. He parked at the

rendezvous point and slid out of his truck. In front of him the rest of the SWAT team pulled on gear, the

special vest and flame-resistant clothing, his brain tuning out everything else as the lieutenant ran down the

situation.

A simple service of an eviction notice had turned into a hostage situation when the deputy surprised a

felon with outstanding warrants. The deputy took a bullet through the shoulder before stumbling out of the

house and calling it in. Hostage negotiator, a K-9 unit, and about five dozen other LEOs were on scene.

“We’ve cleared the surrounding houses, secured the neighborhood. The negotiator’s trying to talk them

into letting the female hostage out, but they’re not listening.” Lieutenant Jake Williams flattened a roughly

drawn diagram of the house used in the earlier raid and directed his team to their positions. “Montgomery,

Harris. Here, here,” he said, pointing with one thick finger.

His task in this was a simple one. Wait for the signal to rake and break, then secure his room. In this

case, he’d break the window into the back bedroom and order anyone inside to lie on the floor, hands

palm-up, and essentially hold them at gunpoint until other officers arrived to handcuff them. Ben pulled

down his mask, shouldered his rifle, and followed Montgomery through the neighboring house’s side yard.

They took up position and waited. Hours passed as the hostage negotiator tried to get the woman out of the

picture. He could hear her crying until a loud slap silenced her. He clenched his teeth, exhaled slowly

through his nose to calm his heart rate and breathing, and waited.

Inhale, exhale. Listen to the radio traffic coming through his hands-free headset. Inhale, exhale. Stay

absolutely alert but conserve strength and energy. Inhale, exhale. After three hours of negotiation the

woman was allowed to leave. Based on the sounds—a door opening,
get the fuck out, bitch,
and the cry

and thuds of someone falling down a set of stairs—the hostage had been summarily shoved out the front

door and into the waiting arms of the officers outside.

Hold your positions.

Once things escalated this far there was no backing down. Clouds cast the eastern sky in dull gray when

the order to take the door came. The loud bang of a concussion grenade followed by what sounded like a

hail of gunfire worthy of a full-on military assault. He’d broken the window on the back bedroom, and

Montgomery was moving up the back porch when the back door flew open and caught him full in the face.

Despite considerable forward momentum Montgomery slammed back into the rickety railing, which

shattered under his weight, sending him tumbling onto the packed dirt at Ben’s feet.

The suspect took the stairs in a flying leap and sprinted for the neighbor’s yard. Ben took off after him,

adrenaline fueling his muscles. Breath coming in short bursts, he caught the suspect in a flying tackle that

took them both to the ground. Ben took a punch before he jammed his knee in the guy’s kidney and

wrenched his arm high enough up behind his back to make him shriek like a little girl.

Other officers pounded up behind him. Seconds later the suspect was spread-eagled, one knee in his

lower back, another between his shoulder blades with his hand helpfully forcing his face into the dirt while

Ben finished cuffing him. Two guys hauled him up as Ben swiped at his bleeding nose with the back of his

hand.

“Nice tackle. What position did you play again?” one of the other officers asked Ben.

“Linebacker,” Ben said, eyeing the suspect.

“Hear that, asshole?” the officer said cheerfully. “It’s your lucky day. A former Texas linebacker just

took you down.”

“Motherfucker,” the guy spat at Ben.

Ben flashed him a grin made gory by the blood trickling from his nose. “Work on your wind in prison.

You’re slow.”

“Fuck you.”

They hauled him away. Ben rounded the corner of the house where an EMT tried to hustle him to an

ambulance. He ignored her until Williams pointed at the back of the bus.

Inside, Montgomery swore low and vicious while an EMT manipulated his wrist. Ben winced as another

EMT pressed her thumbs to either side of his nose. “It’s not broken,” she said, then broke out the alcohol

wipes to clean up the blood.

“Any of that his?” his lieutenant asked.

“No, sir,” Ben said. “He caught me with an elbow when I took him down.”

Williams watched the EMT wipe blood off Ben’s face for a second, then said, “Nice tackle. You hear

me calling you off?”

Ben looked at him. “No, sir.”

“That’s why we have Hera,” he said, pointing to Ryan Sanchez, the team’s K-9 handler, and Hera, his

Belgian Malinois. Hera looked pissed. Ben made a mental note to give her a wide berth when he left. “When

they run we send Hera after the bad guys. She hauls them down, makes them piss in their pants, then we

arrest them.”

He hadn’t heard a thing after Montgomery landed in a heap at his feet. Not a thing except his own

breathing. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Fuck it all, Harris!”

The EMT had been on enough calls to know when to make herself scarce. She packed cotton up Ben’s

nostrils, handed him an ice pack, and found something else to do.

Williams got right in Ben’s face. “
Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir
. That’s what your patrol lieutenant and the

captain said you repeated like some kind of fucking jacked-up parrot after the gas station incident. You

think this kind of stunt is why we wanted you on SWAT? It’s not. We took you despite this, because your

speed and strength beat out the other candidates. What you did at the gas station almost,
almost
”—Williams

held up his surprisingly elegant fingers a millimeter apart—“got you booted off the team. You hear me?”

Ben knew better than to say anything other than, “Yes, sir.”

“You’ve got the physical skills of a world-class athlete and the judgment of a sixteen-year-old kid.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stop saying that, Harris.” Williams studied him for a long, painful moment. “You got someone to go

home to? A girlfriend? Wife?”

Prudently, Ben just shook his head.

“Just someone you call when you want to lose all of this in a warm body.”

It wasn’t a question, so he shrugged.

His lieutenant gave an impatient grunt. “Someone regular? The same warm body? Or just a list of phone

numbers you got at that bar where you work?”

Ben cracked the ice pack against the side of the bus to activate it. “You ordering me to get a girlfriend,

Lieutenant?”

“I’m making a suggestion. You’re eight years into the job. As far as I can tell, you’ve got nothing but

the job. You need a reason to go home in one piece at the end of the day. We’ve got too much money

invested in you for you to burn out in a year.”

“Sir,” Ben said, an acknowledgment that his commanding officer had spoken, nothing more.

“I mean it, Harris.” The lieutenant put his finger too close to Ben’s aching face for comfort. “Get a

hobby. Get a dog. Do something. We all want to catch bad guys, but if I get any more calls from your

sergeant about you doing stupid shit because you’re so adrenaline-jacked you don’t think straight, we’re

going to have words.”

• • •

Ben extracted the packed cotton from his nose somewhere in the second hour of paperwork,

finished up around ten, then hauled himself home to shower. Only when he saw his neighbors leaving

dressed for church did he remember Rachel would arrive at his apartment at eleven. At least he didn’t have

to text anyone to help him work off the adrenaline rush. Rachel would show up in thirty minutes with

nothing more on her mind than sex.

He left his filthy clothes on the bathroom floor, swallowed Tylenol for the dull ache threatening his

shoulder and the throbbing across the bridge of his nose, and stepped into the shower. As the water coursed

over his face and shoulders, flashes of the night came back to him. The call. Suiting up, breaking the glass,

seeing Montgomery go ass over teakettle through the railing. That undeniable thrill of taking off after a

felon. The impact of his body against the runner’s, their bodies against the ground. Life was a full-contact