Over the radio, a male voice: “Shield nine-twenty is ten-forty-five-A, en route to Harborview.” Boldt heard it: 10-45A-Condition of Patient Is Good.
LaMoia heard this too, and finally stopped digging. Boldt held the man by the ankles, in an attempt to drag him out of there. They met eyes in the light of Babcock’s flashlight. Something communicated between them, as it can only communicate between two men who love the same woman.
“Nine-twenty,” LaMoia breathed, the white of his teeth showing behind a smile. Her.
“Yeah,” Boldt said. “I heard.”
Faint Hope
As two male nurses rushed Matthews through Emergency into a curtained stall where blue-clad physicians awaited her, Matthews asked, “Was there a girl … a pregnant girl …?”
One of them aimed a small light into her eyes and pulled at her forehead, stretching and lifting her eyelids. She blinked furiously.
“You’re in Harborview Medical Center’s emergency room,”
a man’s voice reported calmly.
She took the doc by his surgical scrubs and pulled his face down to hers. “A girl … a knife wound … pregnant.”
The doctor separated himself, barked a few orders for injec-tions, and then checked with his nurse, a gentle-eyed black woman. This nurse shook her head gravely at the doctor while eyeing Matthews. “She didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
“The baby?” Matthews asked. Someone pricked her skin with a needle. She winced. The clear plastic tubing of an IV rig was quickly untangled. A fluid dripped, followed by a warm wave of relaxation and peace. A sedative. The feeling threatened to consume her.
“We’re going to stitch you up,” she heard the doctor say.
“We’ve given you something to help with pain.”
“The baby?” she whispered at the nurse.
The nurse leaned into her, her face suddenly much more gentle. “They were going to try to deliver the baby postmortem.”
She could barely keep her eyes open. Sleep pulled her down.
But she managed to reach out and find the nurse’s hand. The woman leaned in closely. Matthews said, “LaMoia … police officer … is he okay?”
The woman looked at her with soft eyes. “Rest,” she said peacefully.
“No drugs,” Matthews said.
“It’s just something to relax you.”
“Not me,” she complained hoarsely, trying to sit up, but failing. The nurse eased her back down. “Cowboy … no drugs. He can’t have drugs. He …” She couldn’t get another word out, her tongue an uncooperative slug. A deep purple light fanned in at the edges of her eyes, stealing away the nurse and finally the overly bright light above the bed. Just before the goo dragged her down for good, she thought she heard the nurse say something, but it blended into a dream, and she lost all track of it.
Winning the Yes
“I owe you,” LaMoia called out from behind the roar of his kitchen blender and a batch of LaMoia’s original- recipe margaritas. Blue patrolled the kitchen floor licking up spills. LaMoia drizzled tequila through an open hole in the lid. A plate of raw salt awaited to his left.
“Damn right you do.” She wore a sling on her left arm, some bandages he couldn’t see. She sat on a padded stool at his kitchen counter. Even her bottom was sore.
He wore a series of serious bruises on his face and arms like medals of honor. He caught her looking. “You could kiss them to make them better.”
“Are we flirting?” she asked. Not wanting to be in the houseboat where Walker had watched her so closely, she’d been living as LaMoia’s houseguest for the past week. As friends. But on this night romance simmered beneath the surface, and both felt it.
He delivered the drinks. “Get over it.”
“Delicious,” she said, sampling the concoction.
“More where that came from.”
“Indeed.”
He raised his glass. “To forgetting.”
She knew he meant well by such a toast, but it only served to remind her of all the forgetting she had yet to do. Ferrell Walker wouldn’t be forgotten-at least not by a legal system hungry to prosecute him. The man had months, years, of waiting to do-first in the hospital, then a prison in the eastern part of the state. His rescue from the debris of the cave-in had come nearly twenty minutes after LaMoia’s. His oxygen-starved brain had failed to recover following resuscitation. The guards called him “a drooler.” LaMoia called him pitiful. Matthews called him a casualty. She wouldn’t soon forget Margaret either, or the little baby girl the doctors had saved postmortem. Inquiries had been made: Margaret’s mother and stepfather, her only living family, had refused the child.
An honors memorial service had been held that same afternoon for Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair. Neither Matthews nor LaMoia had attended.
She sloshed the tangy ice around her mouth, taking a big gulp. “I could have about five of these.”
“Now that’s more like it,” LaMoia said.
“You want to get me drunk, John?”
“It was your idea, not mine. Besides, you’re not exactly drinking alone here, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He considered this. “Have I ever seen you drunk, Matthews? I don’t think so.
You see? That’s another thing about you: You’re always in such total control-of you, and everyone around you.”
She drank too fast and froze her throat. LaMoia brought the mixer’s pitcher over and refilled her glass halfway. He fully topped off his own.
“More, please.” When he failed to accommodate her, she reached for the pitcher with her good hand, but LaMoia caught her gently by her wrist.
LaMoia said, “No more for you. You don’t get any excuses.”
“Excuses for what?” she asked, bewildered by his refusal.
For a moment, the room held perfectly still-the ferries out on the bay stopped moving; the rivulets of margarita froze on the side of the mixer-the only sound in the room the steady thumping of Blue’s tail against one of the stools and the high octane drumming in her ears.
He reached over, took hold of her shirt, and carefully drew her to him. She reached out for balance with her good hand as he planted his lips onto hers and drew the wind out of her, drew her eyelids down, her head spinning, her toes dancing in her shoes. She felt everything inside tense like she’d grabbed hold of a live wire, and then her muscles melted into a steadily increasing warmth that rose into her chest and flooded her thighs.
Her free hand laced into his curly hair and she kissed him back.
His bar stool nearly went over.
She wanted to get naked. She wanted him inside her, right here on the kitchen counter.
He whispered, “No excuses for that.”
“You make a mean margarita.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“In all sorts of things.” Where had that come from? She added, “I may be a little rusty.”
“You don’t feel rusty.” His hand was inside the back of her shirt. Her head tingled.
