She ate half a bagel and some cream cheese from the breakfast buffet at the hotel and was on the road as soon as she got her car keys back. She was doing just fine until she made pit stops in Kingman and again in Needles. By the time she was outside Barstow, she was feeling no pain. That was when she drifted off the highway. Without even noticing the rumble strips, she slammed into a bridge abutment and rolled over several times into a dry riverbed.
Brenda was knocked unconscious. Her seat belt kept her from being ejected from the vehicle, but the sudden force exerted by the belt broke her collarbone in two places. By the time rescuers reached her, she had regained consciousness and was screaming at the top of her lungs. Her nose was broken, as was a bone in her right wrist. There were several cuts on her body as well, some from flying debris from the windshield but others from glass from numerous broken booze bottles, most of them empty, that had gone flying around the passenger compartment of the battered BMW as it finally rolled to a stop.
One of the early first responders was a San Bernardino deputy sheriff who noticed the all-pervading odor of tequila and took charge. He summoned an ambulance. Once Brenda was loaded into it, he followed the ambulance to Barstow Community Hospital, where he saw to it that the doctors caring for the patient also administered a blood alcohol test, which came back at more than three times the legal limit. That was enough to maintain the deputy’s interest and make his paperwork easier. It was also enough for the alert ER doc to admit her to the hospital for treatment of her injuries as well as medically supervised detox.
Afterward, Brenda Riley would recall little about her three-day bout with DTs. The acronym DT stands for “delirium tremens,” and Brenda was delirious most of the time. Even with IV drips of medication and fluids, the nightmares were horrendous. When the lights in the room were on, they hurt her eyes, but when she turned them off, invisible bugs scrambled all over her body. And she shook constantly. She trembled, as though in the grip of a terrible chill.
During her stay at Barstow Community Hospital, Brenda Riley wasn’t under arrest; she was under sedation. She wasn’t held incommunicado, but there was no phone in her room. Besides, when she finally started coming back to her senses, she had no idea who she should call. She sure as hell wasn’t going to call her mother or Ali Reynolds.
Finally, on day four, the doctor came around and pronounced her fit enough to sign release forms. Once he did so, however, there was a deputy waiting outside her room with an arrest warrant in hand along with a pair of handcuffs. Brenda left the hospital in the back of a squad car, once again dressed in what was left of the still- bloodied clothing she’d been wearing when she was taken from her wrecked BMW-her totaled BMW, her former BMW.
It didn’t matter how the press found out about any of it, but they did. There were reporters stationed outside the sally port to the jail, snapping photos of her as the patrol car with her inside it drove into the jail complex.
Sometime during that hot, uncomfortable ride from the hospital to the county jail with her hands cuffed firmly behind her back Brenda Riley finally figured out that maybe Ali Reynolds was right after all. Maybe she really did need to do something about her drinking.
First the cops booked her. They took her mug shot. They took her fingerprints. They dressed her in orange jail coveralls and hauled her before a judge, where her bail was set at five thousand dollars. That was when they took her into a room and told her she could make one phone call. It was the worst phone call of Brenda’s life. She had to call her mother, collect, and ask to be bailed out of jail.
Yes, it was high time she, Brenda Riley, did something about her drinking.
Peoria, Arizona
Back in Peoria that Friday, Ali Reynolds knew nothing of Brenda’s misadventures in going home. At noon Ali went back to her dorm room to check her cell for messages. Ali understood that the major purpose of academy training was to give recruits the tools they would need to use once they were sworn officers operating out on the street. Weapons training and physical training were necessary, life-and-death components of that process. The rules of evidence and suspect handling procedures would mean the difference between a conviction or a miscarriage of justice.
Drills on the parade ground were designed to instill discipline and a sense of professional pride. That sense of professionalism was, in a very real sense, the foundation of the thin blue line. Still, some of the rules rankled. There was a blanket prohibition against carrying cell phones during academy classes, to say nothing of using them. In the first three weeks, instructors had confiscated two telephones and kept them for several days as punishment and also as an object lesson for other members of the class.
Ali had definitely gotten the message. She had taken to returning to her room for a few minutes at lunchtime to make and take calls. That Friday, there was only one text message awaiting her. B. said that he had landed in Phoenix, picked up his vehicle, was on his way to Sedona, and would see her at dinner. That was all Ali really wanted to know.
On her way back to class, Ali encountered one of her fellow recruits, Donnatelle Craig, out in the hallway. Donnatelle was an African-American woman, a single mother, who hailed from Yuma. She was standing in front of the door to her room, weeping, and struggling through her tears to insert her room key into the lock.
Ali stopped behind her. “Donnatelle, is something wrong?”
“I flunked the evidence handling test,” she said. “Sergeant Pettit just told me if I screw up again, I’m out. I can’t lose this chance,” she sobbed. “I can’t.”
When she finally managed to push open the door to her room, Ali followed her inside uninvited. Donnatelle heaved herself down on the bed, still weeping. Looking around, Ali noticed that, unlike the comfortable messiness of her own room, this one was eerily neat. Nothing was out of place. The only personalization consisted of a framed photo on the small study desk-a picture of Donnatelle flanked by three smiling youngsters, two boys and a girl. The girl, clearly the youngest, was missing her two front teeth.
“Are these your kids?” Ali asked.
Donnatelle nodded but didn’t answer.
“Who takes care of them while you’re here?”
“My mom,” Donnatelle said.
Ali didn’t ask about the children’s father. He wasn’t in the photo, and he probably wasn’t in the picture anywhere else either.
“What did you do before you came to the academy?” Ali asked.
Sniffling, Donnatelle sat up. “I was a maid, in a hotel,” she said. “But I wanted to do more. I wanted to do something that would make my kids proud of me-something besides making other people’s beds. So I went back to school and got my GED. The sheriff said he’d give me a chance, but I’m not good at taking tests, I’m scared of guns, and Sergeant Pettit has it in for me.”
School had always been easy for Ali. She aced written exams at the academy in the same way she had aced exams in high school and college. And she had come here with a more than nodding acquaintance with her own handgun and how to use it. Her notable failure with Jose Reyes was the first real black mark on her academy record.
Donnatelle, on the other hand, had come to the academy with a school record that was less than exemplary, but Ali found her determination to improve herself for the sake of her children nothing short of inspiring.
“That may be true,” Ali said ruefully, “but I seem to remember you were fine in the hip toss. You threw your guy down and you don’t have a black eye either. Besides I think Sergeant Pettit has a problem with women-any women.”
Donnatelle sat up and gave Ali a halfhearted smile. “But my guy wasn’t as big or as tough as yours was.”
“Are you going home this weekend?” Ali asked.
Donnatelle shook her head. “It’s too far. I’m going to stay here and work on the evidence handling material. They’re going to let me retake the exam next week. As for the gun thing?” She shrugged hopelessly. “I don’t know what to do about that.”
“Had you ever handled a gun before you got here?”
Donnatelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not ever.”
“You need to practice,” Ali said. “Spend as much time on the range this weekend as you can.”
“I was going to, but now I can’t,” Donnatelle said. “They told me the range here is going to be closed because it’s a holiday.”
