LITMIR.BIZ

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you,” I muttered to my hospital visitor. It was difficult to speak because of the lump in my throat.

      “For what?”

      “For saving my life.”

      “That was my job,” he said. “You were one of my guys. So what have you done with yourself?”

      “I wanted to help people,” I answered. “I’ve been a cop, first at Seattle PD and later for the attorney general’s office.”

      “Married?”

      I nodded. I didn’t say, “Third time’s the charm,” but that’s what I meant.

      “I never got to tell her good-bye,” he said quietly.

      He didn’t say who. I knew Lieutenant Davis had been engaged at the time of his death, but that was all I knew. Once he was gone, I wasn’t close enough to know all the gory details, and the guys who were close enough—the ones who were still alive—were all too broken up about losing him to talk about it. As far as they were concerned, Lennie D. was the best and the brightest. And if it’s true that the good die young, what am I doing still hanging around?

      “I knew you had a girl back home,” I said.

      It was his turn to nod. “Bonnie and I were engaged. I couldn’t talk her into marrying me before I shipped out. We were going to get married in Japan on my R and R.”

      “Sorry,” I said.

      “Me, too,” he said. “I just wish she knew how much.”

      Just then Mel appeared in the doorway. The moment she did, Lieutenant Davis disappeared. The playing cards on my hospital tray vanished. I hadn’t thought I was asleep, but I must have been.

      “Talking in your sleep?” Mel asked, entering the room like a fast-moving storm. “How are you feeling? Did you sleep well? Breakfast is on its way. The lady with the trays is two doors down the hall.”

      Just that fast, she swept away my nighttime’s worth of strange visitations.

      “I heard your voice as I was coming down the hall,” she said, kissing me lightly on the forehead. “I thought the nurse might be in here with you.”

      “Nope,” I said as brightly as I could manage. “Nobody here but us chickens.” I wasn’t about to tell her I had been busy having a heart-to-heart conversation with a fifty-year-old Ghost of Christmas Past.

      “I’m on my way to work,” she continued. “Thought I’d stop by and check in with you before I hit 520.”

      The Seattle area branch of the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team is located in the Eastgate area of Bellevue, across Lake Washington from our downtown Seattle condo. We used to cross Lake Washington on I-90, a bit south of the 520 bridge. Now, since the state has seen fit to start charging outrageously expensive tolls on 520—the Money-Sucking Bridge, as Mel calls it—traffic on it has dropped remarkably, while traffic on I-90 has gotten terrible. Since we can afford the tolls, we usually opt for less traffic.

      “From here I’ll take the scenic route,” she said. “I’ll go through the arboretum.”

      Nurse Keith came in just then. “Vitals before you get breakfast,” he said, slapping the blood pressure cuff around my arm. While he was inflating it, I introduced him to Mel.

      Melissa Soames is very easy on the eyes under the worst of circumstances. Dressed as she was for work, she looked downright spectacular, and I did notice that her looks weren’t lost on Keith, either. Clearly my previous musings about his possible sexual preferences were totally off the mark.

      “What’s on the agenda for today?” Mel asked.

      She was being a little too cheerful. That meant she was still worried about me, even though she wouldn’t come right out and say so.

      “Breakfast and then a round of physical therapy,” Keith answered. “Jonas here may think he’s on vacation, but he’s wrong about that. The PT team will see to it that he doesn’t just lie around getting his beauty sleep. We’ll have him up and out of bed in no time.”

      “I told Harry I’d be in today,” Mel said. “I already know he wants me up in Bellingham, but I could always call him and let him know I need to take another day off.”

      Harry was Harry Ignatius Ball, Squad B’s hopelessly politically incorrect leader. We generally refer to him in public by his preferred moniker, Harry I. Ball, because it’s usually good for a laugh, one Harry enjoys more than anyone else. The fact that Mel avoided using that name with Nurse Keith told me she wasn’t in a lighthearted mood. I also knew that her asking for the day off wasn’t going to work.

      The previous week there had been a supposedly “peaceful” rally just outside the Western Washington University campus in Bellingham. Peaceful is a relative term, and this one had devolved into a window-smashing flash mob in which not just one but three WWU students ended up being Tasered by members of the local police department. Naturally, the errant students were claiming police brutality, even though so far the dash cams on the cops’ patrol cars seemed to back up the officers’ claims that they had considered themselves to be in grave danger at the time.

      I’ll never understand why kids think it’s okay to come to “peaceful demonstrations” armed with baseball bats, but maybe that’s just me.

      As soon as the police-brutality claim was raised, Bellingham’s chief of police, Veronica Hamlin, was on the phone to the attorney general’s office down in Olympia, pleading for backup and for an unbiased investigation. At that point, the police-brutality investigation could have landed with the Washington State Patrol, but Attorney General Ross Connors, as the ultimate boss of both that agency and ours, was the one who made the call to use Special Homicide.

      I doubt Chief Hamlin was thrilled when she learned that Squad B, under Harry’s leadership, would be the ones handling the investigation into her department and being responsible for pulling her bacon out of the fire—or not. After all, years earlier in her role as assistant chief, Ms. Hamlin had been the prime mover behind Harry’s being given his walking papers from that very same department.

      Sometimes what goes around really does come around. Of course, Harry wouldn’t ever leave some poor street cop hanging out to dry just to get even. He insisted that the investigation be scrupulously unbiased, which is why, as soon as it came up on Friday, Harry had put Mel in charge. She had spent Saturday and Sunday in Bellingham conducting interviews, and had returned to Seattle late Sunday evening so she could be on tap Monday morning for my surgery.

      “You know you can’t do that,” I said. “Harry needs you.”

      “Veronica Hamlin is a witch,” Mel said. “She’d sell those two poor cops down the river in a minute if she didn’t think that ultimately it would make her look bad.”

      “Which is why you need to go to work instead of hanging around here looking after me.”

      “What’s the matter?” Keith asked, grinning at her. “Don’t you trust us?”

      A lady waltzed into the room carrying my breakfast tray. The food looked better than it tasted. The omelet was rubbery, the orange juice was anything but fresh squeezed, the toast was unbuttered and cold, and the coffee was only remotely related to the high-test stuff we make at home, but I was hungry enough that I ate it all. And I was glad when Mel gave me a breezy good-bye peck on the cheek and then took off rather than sitting there watching me eat.

      True to Keith’s word, the PT ladies appeared the moment breakfast was over. Once again, they pried me out of bed. Then they put a second hospital gown on backward to cover my backside while we hit the corridor and walked. I wasn’t as worried this time, not as much as I had been the day before. I noticed that there were lovely pieces of art lining the wall—something that had escaped my notice the day before. I also noticed that this time the nurses’ station didn’t seem nearly as far away as it had the first time we went there. I climbed back into bed, proud of myself

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