Possession (7 page)

She ran alone, her breath sounds carrying back to him as he watched from the trees. Her jogging shoes slapped the asphalt steadily, but she ran like all women, arms flung out too far from her sides, breasts bouncing. The woman's hair was tied back with a red band around her forehead, wispy, fine, black, and faintly curly.

He must have made a sound, although he was not aware of it. For an instant, she turned her head toward the woods, and he saw her full face. Her large eyes looked... not frightened, but wary ... and she ran past him, stepping up her pace.

He stopped himself from calling out to her; she would not recognize him yet. He had to expect that it would take a long time, but he felt the first ballooning of joy in his gut, the first wonder that it had come about. His knees trembled as he watched her run away from him, knowing it was only for the moment, knowing that she would never really run away from him again.

There was lettering on the back of her T-shirt. He raised his binoculars to make out what it said:

Natchitat County Sheriff's Office Wives' Bowling League

And beneath those smaller letters, a name in flowing script:

Joanne 44

Danny Lindstrom watched the red and yellow lights dotting the dispatcher's panel and saw them blur, merge into each other, and then separate. He shook his head, as if he could jar the fatigue loose with an abrupt movement.

It was 4:12 A.M., and he was officially off duty, but it was always difficult to come down off" shift—especially third watch. He chose to work the 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. shift, because it gave him his days with Joanne. But he knew also that the hours of darkness were when everything happened, and the sights and sounds and smells set his mind at a pitch where adrenalin flowed as a natural component of blood. When it was hot and the moon was full, like tonight, almost every radio squawk brought situations laced with danger and excitement. He wanted it as much as he feared it. Hell, he sought it out; he was bored with routine police work and even after eight years he still got a kick out of flipping on the blue lights and jamming his thumb on the siren button. But it left him drained physically and emotionally and always with that fine edge of anxiety when it was time to pack it in and go home. It was hard to let go.

He remembered now the hassle with Joanne. He hated arguing with her just as he was leaving for work, but she was determined to go out jogging by herself, no matter how many times he'd warned her that being a policeman's wife was no automatic guarantee against rape. And that had made her madder. Everything set her off lately. He knew what it really was; it was the same old argument about the baby, or, rather, the fact that there was no baby. Every time she started her period, she cried.

"You don't just pull babies out of a hat," he'd told her.

"No, you don't, Danny. At least, we sure don't. If you 45

could just see past your precious ego and go have those tests, maybe we'd find out what's wrong with our hat."

"My hat, you mean," he'd said, and slammed out of the house, and immediately felt rotten. What she was asking of him wasn't that much, but he couldn't bring himself to jerk off into a bottle.

He rubbed his eyes, trying to close out the picture of Joanne, her jaw set, her eyes furious. He hadn't even thought about her all night. Since he and Sam had reported in at a quarter to eight, neither of them had had time to think about anything, take a leak, or have a cup of coffee or a meal break. That was one way to avoid thinking about marital problems.

It had begun with a squaw fight at the Bald Eagle—two of them clawing and scratching over the sorriest buck of a man he'd come across in a long time. When it was over, there'd been blood all over the Bald Eagle, and enough spilled beer to float the whole place right down Main Street into the Columbia River. One of the old gals had her breast laid open from her collarbone right through her right nipple, and the other had fought and kicked and bitten them as they wrestled her into their patrol car. Sam was nursing a dead-center hit in his family jewels and their unit was missing a back window. The object of the ladies' jealousy had sat at the bar boozing quietly throughout the fray, never looking up. Hell, he'd been smart; his balls weren't hurting.

Danny glanced over at Sam who sat gingerly on the edge of the report desk, scribbling out the Field Investigation Report on the pickup they'd stopped right after midnight, an old beater full of bearded punks who'd given them a Seattle address and a lot of flak about being pulled over. Something was wrong about that truck, but they hadn't scored a hit on Wants and Warrants, and they'd had to let them go. They'd both figured the rig was a mobile cocaine stash, but they couldn't search it: no probable cause. The inviolate rights of the American citizen. Sure as hell, they'd get a call from the coast on that one in a week or so, but the old truck would be long gone by then.

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Danny sighed. He wondered sometimes why they bothered. Every time they made a stop like that one, they were flirting with having a .45 shoved up their noses.

The state cop—Richards, yeah, Richards—had bought the farm on the same stretch of highway last winter, just walking over to some vehicle he'd stopped. He and Sam had found the poor bastard sprawled face down in the snow with his ticket book still in his hand, his gun still bolstered. Richards's body lying there wasn't as bad somehow as the imprint left behind in the frozen bank after the hearse left. Angel in the snow. The perfect outline of arms and legs and head there, and the great splotch of red where Richards's blood had melted the snow beneath his heart. They'd thrown a great funeral, though. Cops from Spokane. Cops from Seattle, Wenatchee, Yakima, Ellensburg, even Puyallup, with a sprinkling of FBI guys, ATF agents, the Mounties in their red tunics, plus the whole damned State Patrol. Well, they should be good at funerals. Richards's was the third cop funeral in eastern Washington in a year. A familiar bleakness rose in his gut, and he drew a deep breath. Sometimes he could see himself lying beside a road someplace, as motionless as a drunk, only not drunk. Dead. He wondered if Sam ever felt that presentiment of doom, if Sam ever felt that his time was running out. Danny never asked him; talking about fear was an unwritten taboo with cops. Don't say it out loud and it won't happen.

If either of them was living on borrowed time, it would have to be Sam. Sam was forty-eight, a veteran of two departments and twenty-seven years, survivor of two marriages, and with such a thirst for alcohol that his liver should have turned to stone years ago. Booze had gotten him booted off the Seattle Police Department, out of the homicide unit. Sam had made it on the street, on the bikes, and into the rarefied air of homicide. Danny wondered how it must be for him to be back in uniform now in a county car.

But that was something else they never talked about. He studied Sam as he bent over the report, one hand splayed on the desk, his long, skinny legs dangling next to

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the spittoon that had been there for forty years. Clinton looked as if he'd been born and raised in Natchitat County. His tooled boots were beat up but polished, just like every other deputy's were. His skin was as tanned and crisscrossed with frown and smile lines as any apple grower's. Danny couldn't picture him in the suit, white shirt, and striped tie he must have worn when he was a Seattle dick.

He stretched and said softly to Sam, "How's your balls? Maybe you better get home and pack them in ice."

Sam stood up painfully and grinned, showing the gap between his front teeth. "They're better than yours on a good day, Junior."

Fletcher looked up from the dispatch desk and laughed. "He's right, Clinton. You better get on back to your trailer and ice 'em down. At your age, anything that will make them keep, you better give it a shot."

"There's some things that go on forever, gentlemen," Sam said. "I may just drop in on Mary Jean on the way home, Fletch, and show her what a real stud can do—since you're stuck here playing radio."

Fletcher laughed.

"Mary Jean's working tonight, old buddy. You'll have to go over to the maternity ward and see if she can slip out to the broom closet with you, but don't hold your breath. I just talked to her and they're catching babies over there as fast as the mamas can squeeze them out."

"Full moon," Sam nodded. "You can count on it. I'll nail her next week."

"It won't be hard to catch her," Fletcher grinned. "That little woman is putting on weight. I think she weighs more than I do."

Mary Jean Sayers outweighed Fletch easily by eighty pounds, but Danny and Sam tactfully avoided agreeing with the little radio operator. Sam, in fact, envied Fletch, dreading the thought of returning to his own mobile home empty of any living thing except his old tomcat.

Sam didn't want to leave the sheriffs office; it was more home to him than anyplace else, just as all the department offices over the years had been. He belonged here, bull-

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shitting with Fletch and Danny and the deputies who wandered in and out. He liked the smell of the place: cigar smoke, dusty files, leather, gun oil, and drifts of aroma from the jail kitchen beyond the steel mesh doors behind the waiting room. Working graveyard, he could make the work time stretch, usually delay until the sun began to creep up on the other side of the hills before he'd finished his paper work. Everybody else had someplace to go after shift, and someone to go to. Sam had run through everyone he'd ever had waiting for him, and he tried not to think about the women who had finally had enough of him. Enough of him, and liquor, and too much overtime, too many night call-outs, and his stumblings from grace with other women.

When Sam left home at twenty to join the navy, he encountered a seemingly endless supply of girls and more-than-girls who responded both to his open acceptance of them and his profound sexual force. Somehow, he could not keep them or they could not keep him. But until he was forty, until Nina, he had emerged unscathed beyond a fleeting depression. After Nina, he still liked women but doubted that any singular love might be his again. And he blamed only himself. Even sitting here in the office, nursing his bruises, he felt no animosity toward the Indian woman who'd landed the blow. She'd been hysterical over a real or imagined rejection by the runty cowboy at the bar. She hadn't wanted to go to jail, but he couldn't blame her for that. He'd been in a lot of jails, knowing he wasn't the one to be locked in, and they still gave him the feeling that his throat was closing up, that he could not expand his lungs fully behind the iron doors.

The Indian girls bloomed and faded quickly, like the morning glories that clung to the trellis outside his trailer. Their cheekbones soon blurred with fat, then-burnished skin turned putty color, and their reedlike bodies became trapped in a burgeoning cocoon of their own flesh. The Indian men buckled too under the pressures of the white man's culture, but Sam didn't feel sorry for them the way he did for the women. 49

Wanda Moses hadn't meant to kick him personally; he'd just been part of the enemy. Tomorrow she'd wake up in the women's section of the jail with a grinding headache, puking, and she would have no memory of how she'd gotten there.

Danny's voice pierced his reverie. "You ready to split, pard?"

Sam slid the original of the FIR into the box marked "Undersheriff," and the carbons into the in-take file, and then limped toward Danny with the pretense of a man in excruciating pain. Danny laughed, and Sam wished for the thousandth time that there was some way to delay the moment when they'd head out on the highway in Danny's pickup. He loved Danny, as he'd loved all his partners, all the men who had stood between him and harm, all the men whose lives he, in turn, had felt responsible for.

Neither of his wives had understood the strength—the need—in that bond between males.

Penny had screamed at him once, "You care more about that goddamned Al Schmuller than you do about me! He gives you more of a hard-on than I do!"

That had been true, in a way. Not the last part. But Al knew where he lived and how he lived and what a tenuous grasp each of them had on staying alive when they worked the Tact Squad during the riots of the sixties. He and Al had faced ugly things together, and then drank together at the Greek's afterward. And three martinis barely blurred the memory of firebombs lobbed from roofs of old buildings at Twenty-third and Pine.

When he walked out, he'd thought that it would be temporary, but she'd never let him come back. Three days after the divorce, she'd married a civilian.

He'd thought Gloria would be different because she worked in the records section, and because she was a cop's widow. It had been O.K. as long as they worked the same shift. Had he loved Gloria? It was hard to remember. He'd loved her kid and had probably stayed with the mother longer because of the boy. But the marriage had started to erode from the moment he was assigned to second watch.

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When it was over, he missed the kid more than Gloria. And then there was only the job, and he was all right. He was good. He could concentrate and learn, and he went to every seminar he could sign up for: death investigation, narcotics, bomb search, even a weird demonstration of blood patterns when Englert, the expert from Oregon, showed up with the real stuff (and Lord knows where he got it) and explained how to tell from the spatters whether it was high-or low-velocity impact blood spray.

Sam found he could limit his drinking to a beer or two. When he moved into the homicide unit, it made up for a lot of his losses; it was what he was meant to do. It seemed as though he was always working, but nobody cared anymore if he was home at dawn or at noon. He had the knack. That it was a knack to see through the intricate puzzles of violent death did not seem strange to him. He reveled in his skill, and accepted the commendations from the brass and the respect of his peers casually. There were women in his life again, women who wanted him, the thirty-five-year-old Sam Clinton who had it all together after the long bad time. Their faces blended into a melange of sexual satisfaction and escape. He called them all "Sweet Baby," and he was neither committed to or involved with any of them, although he tried to stay long enough so that they were not one-night-stands in their own minds, and not so long that he might inflict harm when he left. He grew adept at knowing when to leave. He could no more have done without women than he could have gone without food, but too much closeness threatened him. He'd thought he could go on forever—tasting, enjoying, and moving on when he sensed the time was right. Each parting had torn something from him, but something so subtly damaging that he'd never felt the wound. Jake Sorensen was his homicide partner—Old Jake, who at fifty-six was long since past voluntary retirement age. Jake hung on. Sam made him strong enough to get through the six-month evaluations. Sam made him look good. Together, they made a powerful team. Clinton-and-Sorensen, never referred to singularly and they wanted it