Knowing (46 page)

If you loved this story, you’ll be happy to know that there are several other Jane Perry stories available. Here’s a taste of each:

Jane wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, or how she got to this place. The last thing she remembered was finishing off a fifth of Jack Daniels with her younger brother, Mike. It was around 1:00 A.M. and they were still at her house after a three-day bender over the President’s Day holiday weekend. As she recalled, she’d sucked the last drag of nicotine from her cigarette, crushed the empty pack and attempted a bank shot into the wastebasket across the room. But that was her last memory before she awoke into this odd scene.

There she was—sitting alone in a high-back wicker chair on a pristine, wraparound porch that extended out from what appeared to be one of those ancient Colorado sanitariums where people went to recuperate from TB or pneumonia. She looked down at her clothes, expecting to see a hospital gown to go along with the clinical setting. Instead, she wore her standard blue jeans, poplin shirt, leather jacket, and roughout cowboy boots. She could feel the butt of her Glock biting into her rib cage. She swore she’d been clad in her Denver Broncos sweatshirt and sweatpants just minutes before catapulting into this unsettling shift in scenery.

Good God. In all her years of heavy drinking, Jane had never hallucinated. And now, here she was—right in the middle of one hell of a disturbing delusion that felt a little too real.

She noted how heavy her hands felt against the wicker armrests. Her feet, in turn, hung like lead on the white-planked porch. As she gazed forward, she suddenly noticed the exquisite expanse of trimmed grass that seemed to roll for miles into the aqua sky. The air smelled sweet, like spring when life in Colorado comes alive after months of winter’s death and dormancy. The scent of blooming lilacs and sweet daffodils created an intoxicating perfume that calmed and caressed her senses.

Not 40 feet in front of Jane, a lone East Indian in his mid-forties unexpectedly appeared in the middle of the grass. He stared at her for a minute before cocking his head to the side and waving. She told her body to stand up, but somehow the message didn’t reach the correct part of her brain because she stayed inexplicably frozen to the wicker chair. The man climbed the seven steps that led to the porch and rested his lean body against the railing in front of her. The persistent woody scent of sandalwood enveloped him, an outward signature that seemed to herald his appearance. His smile was warm and genuine, his demeanor gentle and kind.

“Jane…Jane Perry?” he stated, almost as if he was reading her name on an invisible card that floated above her head.

Jane nodded. For some reason, speaking was difficult. The heaviness grew more profound in her body. What in the hell is happening?

He extended his hand. “Devinder Bashir.”

Jane lifted her leaden hand off the armrest and shook his hand. He held onto it, his grasp reading her thoughts.

“How very odd,” Devinder said in a faraway tone.

Jane tensed. She struggled to force out two words. “What’s odd?”

“You still have the weight of the world.” His eyebrows furrowed. “You’re not dead yet.”

Detective Jane Perry woke up with a start. For a second, she had no idea where she was. Her breathing was fast and labored, as though she’d just run a marathon. Jane closed her eyes and let out a loud grunt. Catching her breath, she stared at the ceiling in a slight daze. “Fuck,” was all she could utter in a raspy whisper.

She’d had the same bloody nightmare again. But it was different this time. There was something else; something incongruous to the usual pattern of violence. But that something else was ominously intangible to Jane. It was as though she could damn near taste it and smell the scent of danger but her rational mind couldn’t define it. Whatever this was, it felt patently real, as if it had already happened. She’d always accepted her sixth sense — gut intuitiveness that some cops coined “The Blue Sense.” But that only came into play after exhaustive logical reasoning. Now it appeared that her intuitive mind was morphing into a chaotic, precognitive monster that hid between the shadows of her conscious mind. Jane tried to chalk this tender sense of doom to her five-day booze binge. But she’d hit the bottle hard many times and never felt the queasy uneasiness that was beginning to take on a life of its own. The thought crossed her mind that she was finally losing it. After 35 years of barely holding it together, she feared she might be unraveling. That fear alone jolted her back to her senses as she lay alone in her bed staring into the void.

Jane coughed deeply — the kind of gut cough that comes from over 20 years of chain smoking. She reached over to the bedside table feeling for a pack of cigarettes. The table, just like the rest of the house, was a mess — the tactile consequence of her binge. A dozen empty cigarette packs, three drained bottles of Jack Daniels and a thick coating of ashes from the overturned ashtray littered the small table. Coming up empty handed, she leaned over to the other side of the bed where another table sat askew from the wall. Opening the drawer, Jane found a full pack of Marlboros and a lighter. Her gut-wrenching cough continued as she peeled off the wrapping, jerked a cigarette out of the pack and lit up. She sucked the nicotine into her lungs like a seasoned pro. As the smoke peeled out of her mouth, she examined her bandaged left hand.

The emergency room doctor said the burn could have been worse and told her to apply the silver ointment twice a day to speed the healing. That was 10 days ago and she’d plastered her hand with four coatings of the stuff before she gave up on it. Jane would be hard pressed to find the ointment underneath the debris that cluttered her bedroom. Dirty clothes intertwined with empty take-out cartons. A neat stack of beer stained yellow legal pads covered with writing sat on a pile of
The Denver Post
and
Rocky Mountain News
newspapers. In the ten days since “the incident,” as it became known at Denver Headquarters, she and her partner, Detective Chris Crawley, made the front page of both papers seven times. One photo of her in the
Rocky
was the same mug on her I.D. badge. There she was with that sullen, pissed off expression. In contrast, Chris’ adjacent front-page photo with his sweep of blond hair and narrow, ruddy cheeks, made him look like an altar boy. Subsequent stories on the pair featured a large photo from the disastrous press conference that left more questions unanswered about the explosion. It also left the public wondering if Denver Homicide was as inept as the media portrayed them.

To say the incident haunted Jane Perry was putting it mildly. It was one thing for her to replay the whole thing in her mind second by second and ask herself what she could have done differently. But it was quite another to relive the disjointed images over and over again every night in her dreams. Sitting in the patrol car with Chris. Checking her watch. Chris calling the undercover cops on his cell phone and getting Stover’s ETA. Seeing the Range Rover coming down the street. Observing Bill Stover, his wife Yvonne and their 10-year-old daughter Amy wave toward Jane as they pulled into their driveway. Feeling that instant between the silence and the chaos. Seeing the hood of the SUV explode in a burst of flames amidst the yellow smoke of the C-4 explosive. And then racing toward the burning car and finding Bill and Yvonne slumped across the dashboard and Amy with her hands pressed against the glass, screaming. Trying to open the back door and finding it locked. Then punching her fist against the glass to try and break it as the flames shot around the SUV from the hood. Feeling the icy burn across her left hand as Chris held her back from the car and smelling the melting paint and metal and flesh. Then staring at Amy’s fixated eyes as the life drained out of them. It was that last moment that always shot Jane out of the nightmare and back into her life of hell. And it was just another reason to get loaded.

Jane took a long drag on her cigarette and coughed hard enough to pop a lung. She reached for the empty Jack Daniels bottle in hopes of finding a trickle of liquid relief. No luck. She tossed the bottle across the room and looked at the clock. 8:15. “Shit!” Jane exclaimed as she threw back the covers and struggled to her feet. Clenching the cigarette between her lips, she pressed the palm of her good hand to her forehead in hopes of pushing back the pounding pressure. A helluva way to start her first day back. She had 45 minutes to get dressed, collect her paperwork, fight the morning traffic to DH and be seated in Sergeant Weyler’s office.

As Jane made her way across the bedroom to the bathroom, she tripped over the answering machine with its flashing message light flickering like a warning beacon. Kicking it aside, she peeled off her sweat soaked undershirt and panties and started the water in the shower. She plopped down on the toilet seat and caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The term “rode hard and put away wet,” crossed her mind. There she was, cigarette dangling precipitously from her mouth, her brown, shoulder length hair falling across her sallow face and those bloodshot, brown eyes staring back with dark circles and bags underneath them. “What would Weyler think?” she wondered.

A million thoughts raced through her head as she showered and toweled off. She may have taken medical leave for five days but that didn’t mean she hadn’t organized a few scenarios that could have led to the car bombing. Sure, some of them were pretty wild and the result of a fifth of Jack but Jane still thought they were worth pitching to Weyler. That was the crazy thing about Jane — she could have the biggest load on and still pitch a rational series of probabilities for a crime that would prompt further investigation. Her fellow homicide detectives might call her a “rebel,” “an outsider” or a “bitch,” but no one could deny her intelligence, diligence and that palpable intuition that played a role in solving many of Denver’s most baffling homicides.