The Big Dive Page 4

  “I’m—I’m okay.”

  “I was afraid to call the department,” she said, a growing edge to her voice.

  “I’m sorry, I should have called but it was late. I, uh—I need to talk to you, Paula. In the kitchen.”

  “At this hour?”

  I walked into the kitchen and turned on the lights. The walls were a depressing puke green. I seemed to have neither the time nor money to paint them. Several crayons and an open coloring book with multi-colored scribbles lay on the small Formica kitchen table. Paula entered tying the belt around her lavender terrycloth bathrobe.

  “What’s so important you need to—” She froze like a marble statue when she got a good look at my clothes in the harshness of the light. “Oh, my god!”

  She stepped toward me but I waved her off. “It’s not my blood.”

  “Then whose?”

  I said nothing and slumped in a chair at the kitchen table. I rubbed my face in my hands. The weight of the evening sank into my shoulders. I wondered if I would ever be able to rise again.

  A trembling hand touched a shoulder. “You want coffee?”

  “No, a beer.”

  She pulled a bottle of Falstaff from the refrigerator and set it and a church key on the metal-rimmed table. “I’ll make coffee, anyway,” she said.

  I pried off the cap, took a long tug, and decided I needed something stronger. I retrieved a bottle of Old Taylor Kentucky bourbon from a cabinet, poured three fingers in a glass, and chugged half of it.

  “What happened, Joe?” she said as she fixed the coffee.

  “In a minute,” I said. I sat at the table and downed the rest of the bourbon and poured a second, and drank half of it.

  Silence fell over us like a shroud. She banged the large can of coffee on the counter, measured out the water and the grounds into the aluminum coffee pot, banged the pot on the stove, snapped on the gas burner.

  It had been two years since the nightmare of the Seth Rawlins case, the case that drove my wife, pregnant, to the home of her sister in Lincoln, Nebraska. After catching the killer, I’d gone after her. We’d reconciled, or at least came to an arrangement. An uneasy truce, a cessation of combat, based on the unspoken condition she would live with my being a cop if I would live with her reminders of how much she disliked my being a cop. Our arrangement also stipulated that I would no longer be The Denver Kid solving crimes on the side. I’d work a straight eight, and not a minute longer.

  She’d come home and delivered our baby.

  Ever since, I’d done everything I could to be on my best behavior—not only in our marriage but at work where I’ve been on an unspoken probation after breaking pretty much every departmental rule investigating the Rawlins case. Despite my solving one of the most infamous and complex series of crimes in Denver history, the department would have fired my ass but for the public pressure Lou Sheppard put on them by writing articles extolling The Denver Kid. Stuck with me, the department banished me to night and swing shifts. Normal rotation should have brought days every three months, but day shifts proved rare.

  I’d kept my head down and been a good cop since Paula’s return. A good husband. A good father.

  The Denver Kid was retired.

  Benedict Greene’s murder threatened to change all that.

  The coffee began to perk into the glass knob and Paula lowered the heat. She sat at the table, her empty hands on the yellow surface, her hazel eyes assessing me.

  I looked up from my bourbon. “It’s Benedict.”

  She stiffened. “Oh, god.”

  I sucked in a breath. “He was killed tonight.”

  Her hands went to her mouth. “Oh, dear God!”

  To my relief, she didn’t say, “God, not again!”

  She rose and hooked her arms around my neck, pressing her soft brown hair against mine. “Oh, Joe, I’m so sorry.”

  I wrapped my arms around her waist and squeezed her hard. Her tears wet my cheek and ran down my neck. I wasn’t certain whether they were for Benedict or me.

  “I think the coffee’s ready,” I said after a while.

  She turned off the burner, poured two cups, and returned to the table. I poured my remaining bourbon into the cup and sipped the coffee without blowing it cool. I’d drunk station house brew while I labored on my reports, but the stuff tasted like piss. Paula made hers strong and black.

  We drank in silence until she said, “What happened, Joe?”

  I stared into the darkness of my coffee. “We were investigating a break-in. Benedict went inside and someone killed him.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The killer escaped. I never saw him.”

  “No clues? You saw nothing that—”

  “Drop it, Paula.” She sounded like Detective Bock. “I can’t tell you more than that right now. It’s under investigation.”

  “You always want to drop things when it comes to work, Joe. You might not live with the nightmares again if you talk about this now.”

  I’d live with them. I’d live with them rest of my life. Just as I did with my first dead partner. Talking wouldn’t stop the nightmares. Nightmares were part of being a cop, like old bullet wounds.

  Paula jerked to her feet and held out a hand. “Give me your shirt.”

  “What?”

  “Your shirt! I’m going to wash the blood out.”

  “Is that even pos—”

  “Give it to me.”

  I stood. I was still wearing my Sam Browne belt, so I unstrapped the leather rigging holding my gun and flashlight and looped it over the back of my chair. Paula began filling the sink with cold water. I started to remove my shirt, but remembered the small notebook I always carried in my pocket and pulled it out.

  Two notebooks. Benedict’s and mine. I’d been in such shock, I’d forgotten I’d removed his at the pawnshop. I slipped them into my pants pocket.

  Paula snapped on yellow dishwashing gloves and pointed at my chest. Benedict’s blood was soaked through to my sleeveless undershirt. I peeled it off. She pointed to my pants. A bloody knee.

  “Later,” I said.

  She carried the bloody clothing to the sink as if it were a dead rat. She rubbed the bloodstains with bar soap and began scrubbing with the brush she used to wash potato skins.

  “What happened exactly?” she asked.

  “I told you, honey, I can’t get into the details. It’s under investigation.”

  She stopped scrubbing and glared at me. Her voice rose. “I don’t care about your damn departmental rules. You never have. I’m your wife. What happened?”

  “Shhhh, you’ll wake Olivia.”

  “Tell me, damn it!”

  Until that moment, I’d intended to tell her the truth and why I suspected Benedict’s murder was more than a simple burglary gone wrong. But my intentions faltered in a haze of fatigue, bourbon, her barely repressed anger—and my cowardice. If I confessed the truth, she would detect my need to dig deeper into Benedict’s death and to once again conceal my investigation from the department. I would do exactly what I’d vowed to her two years ago I would never do again—become The Denver Kid. This time, it would destroy our marriage for good. My only hope was to stall, to hope that whatever truth I found would lead to a place where it wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  “Paula, please. I’m exhausted and I can’t—I can’t discuss it right now. Later. I promise.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry, honey. You’re right. This is a terrible time.”

  She returned to scrubbing and I returned to my bourbon-laced coffee. A few minutes later, she stopped and shook her head. “Poor Ellen. Have they told her?”

  “The duty sergeant was going to break the news.”

  I should have been the one. I should have gone. But Detective Luther Bock saw other plans for me.

  “I’ll call her later today,” said Paula.

  “You barely know her.”

  Paula had met Benedict’s wife only once, when we’d gone to their home
for dinner after Benedict and I teamed up. Paula had gone grudgingly. She tried to avoid socializing with cop families. They reminded her too much of my job and its inherent risks.

  “She still needs my support,” she said.

  “There’s nothing you can do for her.”

  “I can cry with her.”

  “Ellen won’t cry.”

  She scoffed. “Sometimes you’re a damn fool, Joe Stryker.”

  Whimpering came from Olivia’s bedroom.

  “Dammit, now you’ve awakened her,” I said.

  “Good. She’ll know her father’s still alive. At least for today.”

  I went into my daughter’s bedroom and lifted her out of her crib.

  “There’s my princess,” I said, holding her high in the air. She squealed with joy.

  Her diaper was soaked, so I changed it, carelessly sticking a finger with a safety pin. I carried her and the stuffed lamb into the kitchen.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Paula said. “Sorry we woke you.”

  Olivia yawned and sat on my lap. After a few minutes, she reached for the coloring book. I pushed aside my coffee and barely touched bottle of beer and brought the book forward. It was open to a lion with several colors scribbled over its body. “What are you coloring?”

  “Lion,” she said proudly.

  Clutching the lamb in her left arm, she picked up a chunky blue crayon and began scribbling over the lion’s head. Paula resumed scrubbing my shirts.

  “I like blue lions,” I said as Olivia scribbled. She stopped and smiled, her eyes as hazel as her mother’s. She studied my shirtless chest and picked curiously at my chest hairs.

  “Uhhh, my shirt is in the laundry,” I said. “Stinky.”

  She giggled and returned to coloring.

  I glanced at Paula scrubbing the bloodstains more fiercely than ever. “This is what I worry about,” she said, her voice banked. “You have a child. You need to be here for your child.”

  “Lots of cops have children.”

  “Tell that to Ellen’s fatherless son.”

  “Kids lose their fathers every day, Paula. Disease, traffic accidents, war . . . divorce. Somebody has to do the job.”

  We fell silent. I brought Olivia a lidded plastic cup of water and two pieces of Zwieback toast. I glanced in the sink in passing. The soap foamed pink.

  “Paula, stop scrubbing! You’re not going to get them clean. I’ll buy new shirts.”

  She lifted the dripping shirts and slammed them back into the sink, splashing water onto the floor. She leaned against the counter and sobbed.

  I rushed to her side and hugged her until her sobbing eased. Olivia was dead silent.

  “Forget the shirts, hon,” I said. “Let’s have some eggs and toast. Nobody’s going back to sleep.”

  Paula peeled off the rubber gloves and turned on a burner under a cast-iron skillet. She broke several eggs into a bowl, added milk, grabbed a fork, and beat the mixture to death.

  I was wrong that none of us was going back to sleep. Exhaustion overtook me and I slept until three in the afternoon. I awoke to Paula’s singsong voice in the living room and Olivia bouncing on her knee.

  “This is the way the lady rides, the lady rides, the lady rides, this is the way the lady rides, so early in the morning. This is the way the gentleman rides, the gentleman rides, the gentleman rides, this is the way the gentleman rides, so early in the morning.”

  By the time I staggered into the bright light of the living room, Olivia was bouncing hard on Paula’s knee as the farmer rode early in the morning.

  “Wheee!” squealed Olivia as Paula dropped her halfway down between her knees.

  They both looked up as I blinked tired eyes. I smiled. “Will you bounce me on your knee, too?”

  “I thought you’d sleep longer,” said Paula, faintly returning my smile. “You need the rest.”

  I shrugged. Nightmares kept waking me. Nightmares I couldn’t remember.

  I warmed up a cup of coffee and resettled in the living room. On Thursdays I usually cared for Olivia while Paula attended class. But Paula let me sleep today, and she probably was no more in the mood to go to class than I was to go to work.

  Paula took morning classes twice a week at the downtown Extension Center of the University of Colorado. Mostly refresher courses in economics because she hadn’t used her degree since the war. Furthering her education was another of her demands for returning from Nebraska. She’d worked military intelligence during the war and wanted to use her GI bill to develop a career worthy of her educational background. She’d almost gone to work for an oil company two years ago, until she learned she was pregnant. I wasn’t enthused about her taking classes. I wanted her to be a full-time mom, like many women who’d worked during the war but quit afterward to raise families. But she would have none of it. She loved Olivia but was determined to have more.

  I played with Olivia while Paula fixed me a grilled cheese sandwich. “Any calls while I was asleep?” I asked.

  “That Detective Bock.”

  I tensed. “What did he want?”

  “He wants you to come in to headquarters tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock.”

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose. The man was proving to be a pit bull that wouldn’t let go of my bloody pants leg. “Any other calls?”

  “No.”

  None of my fellow officers had called to offer condolences or ask how I was doing. No one wanted to talk to a pariah, a bringer of death.

  I puttered around the rest of the afternoon doing minor household repairs. In the evening, we listened to Father Knows Best. Rare for me. Normally I was on duty Thursday nights. Nothing like having a partner murdered so I could catch Father Knows Best with my family.

  During it all, Paula and I walked on eggshells. I sensed she wanted to comfort me, to salve my pain. Just as I had tried to be a good husband and a good cop these past two years, she’d tried hard to be an understanding wife, coming to terms with my being a cop. But there was no escaping the shattering reality that Benedict’s death ripped open old wounds.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Paula and I had met on a blind date. We each came to Denver after the war, a city where everyone came from somewhere else. We were looking for new beginnings. I’d changed during the war and couldn’t return to my old life, the family farm. Paula also had changed and couldn’t return to the religious rigidness of her sister and the family in Nebraska. We hit it off. Maybe because we were genuinely attracted to each other—or because we were two lost souls in the dark.

  Within months we were engaged, and months later, married. It was a small wedding, all we could afford. My parents came from Iowa. Paula’s mother died years before, and her father, a pharmaceutical salesman, was on the road at the time, likely banging one of his road mistresses. But three of her four siblings made it, including her uptight religious sister Eloise.

  At the time, I was working as a mechanic in a small garage, with vague aspirations of owning my own garage someday. Paula worked at a couple of meaningless jobs. She wanted a career, but jobs for women, even ex-military intelligence officers, were scarce.

  One day the owner of a car I was fixing mentioned that the Denver police were looking for patrol officers. Pay was shit, but hell, being a cop sounded far more exciting than lying under greasy motors. The rush of war was still in me. Two months after our wedding, I entered the Denver Police Academy.

  Paula was not happy about my decision. Becoming a cop “was not part of our original bargain.” She’d been pushing me to get out from under the cars and take advantage of the GI bill. Get a college degree, though in what, neither of us knew.

  Although disappointed in my decision, she didn’t harbor the hostility back then that she did now. In my first year on the force, in fact, she found my being a cop rather exciting. That’s when I was making a record number of felony arrests as a rookie and my success attracted the attention of Lou Sheppard at the Rocky Mountain News. Paula was as caught up in The Denver K
id as I was. My career looked bright. I could see making detective. We discussed starting a family.

  Then came the murder of my partner, Derek Flemming. A death I blamed myself for, my failure to pull the trigger during a sliver of an opportunity.

  For Paula, it was a blunt reminder that death was the ultimate risk for a cop. Despite my catching Derek’s killer two years later, it was too late for us. Paula’s hostility toward my job hardened beyond repair. My defiance of the departmental brass while hunting down the killer didn’t help. My shot at making detective waned.

  Paula’s initial eagerness to have children also waned. Who wanted kids when on any given day their father might be killed?

  Looking back, I wondered how our marriage survived those days. Habit? Fear of separation? Fear of the unknown? Heaven knows, many cop marriages don’t survive.

  Olivia’s unexpected arrival changed things yet again. We made our compromises. I’d tried to live by them.

  But now—now Benedict.

  “I should go see Ellen tomorrow,” I said after Olivia went to bed. “The department won’t make me come into work.”

  “I’ll go with you. Olivia can play with Ellen’s son. What’s his name?”

  I hesitated. “It’s best I see her alone.”

  “Why?”

  I have questions I don’t want you to hear.

  “Seeing her will be tough enough as it is,” I said aloud. “It will be easier if it’s just me.”

  “Having all of us there would be comforting for her. Maybe for all of us.”

  I hesitated. “Tell you what. Why don’t you and Olivia try to see Ellen tomorrow. I’ll let her know. But I need to go alone first.”

  Paula accepted the compromise, but then asked, “What are you going to tell her, Joe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About what happened to her husband? You promised you’d tell me after you got some rest. What are you going to tell her?”

  I went into the kitchen and got a beer. I came back, sat down, and lied. The same lies I’d told Bock and the others. Nothing about the radio or that Benedict might be a dark rider or that he likely knew his killer. I felt like shit doing it, but I saw no other way.