With Child

Dead.

She heard the men confer, but made no effort to decipher words. Footsteps, and finally Quinn lifted her like a child and sat her on the couch in the living room. Mindy began to shiver.

“Don’t you have a throw?” he said in frustration.

She squeezed her arms against her body and rocked herself, hardly aware when he disappeared and then reappeared with a comforter he must have torn from the bed in the guest room. Even inside it, she continued to shiver. Her teeth chattered.

A weight settled on the couch beside her and Quinn held a mug to her mouth. Tea. Clumsily, with his help, she drank. Hot liquid ran down her chin, joining the tears that wet her face.

After a moment she took the mug from him and gratefully wrapped cold fingers around it. She drank again, letting it scald her mouth, aware it was sweeter than she would have made it but not caring. The heat sliding down her throat felt so good. Her shivers abated.

Finally she lifted her head. The sergeant stood a few feet away, looking down at her with concern. Quinn still sat beside her, his thigh touching hers, his face so close she could see individual bristles on a chin that was normally clean-shaven.

“You’re sure?” she asked. Begged.

“We’re sure,” Dickerson said.

Still pleading, although no longer with them, Mindy said, “What will I do?”

There was a momentary silence, and then Quinn stood. “What will you do?” He sounded harsh, the man who had always condemned her without knowing her at all. “I’m sure Dean left you taken care of.”

“I didn’t mean…” she tried to explain.

“Do you have someone we can call?” Sergeant Dickerson interrupted. “Family? A friend?”

She instinctively rejected the idea of calling her mother. Selene was her best friend, but…she was such a talker. She wouldn’t know how to hold Mindy without exclaiming over and over and wanting to dissect the tragic events. And who else could Mindy phone in the middle of the night to say, “My husband is dead. Can you come hold my hand?”

Mindy shook her head. “I’ll wait until morning.” Until then…until then, she didn’t know what she’d do. She couldn’t go back to that lonely bed. Perhaps she would just huddle here and try to imagine the man she loved gone. Erased as if he hadn’t existed.

“We’ve only been married a year.” She heard her voice, high and petulant, as if Dean had broken a promise. But he hadn’t. Till death do us part. It just wasn’t supposed to be so soon!

The two men were talking again as if she wasn’t here.

“I want to work this one,” Quinn said. “Who pulled it? Sawyer and Asavade?”

“Dobias and Williams. And the answer is no. You’re dead on your feet. And you’re too involved.”

“He was my best friend. I need to make this collar.”

“Uh-huh. You going to do it dispassionately? Read ’em their rights? When what you really want to do is kill them?”

Quinn paced, fury and grief radiating from him like heat from a woodstove. Mindy felt it without having to watch him.

“Goddamn it! Don’t shut me out!”

“No.” The sergeant didn’t move. Like Quinn, he seemed to have forgotten her. “Dean radioed in a license-plate number. There may have been an arrest already.”

She listened without real comprehension. Dean was dead? It made no sense. She would have worried if he’d still been a cop, but he owned his own security company. He hardly ever took a shift as a guard anymore. He met with property owners and businessmen, did payroll and billing, grumbled about how hard it was to find and keep good employees.

“They all either want to be cops or prison guards.” He’d made a sound of disgust. “They like the idea of swaggering around in a uniform with a gun in a holster. They find out how boring it is patrolling warehouses and apartment complexes at night, they opt out.”

Mindy came back to awareness of the present when she realized that Sergeant Dickerson had sat on the coffee table. Quinn stood to one side.

“Mindy? You with me?”

She nodded.

“Do you know why Dean worked tonight?”

She nodded again. “A new guy called in sick. Dean was really mad, because it was last minute. The dispatcher offered to go out, but Dean said he’d do it. He liked to once in a while, you know.”

“Any good businessman gets down in the trenches. He’d be a fool not to.”

“I wish…” Tears leaked out although she’d thought herself cried dry. “I wish somebody else had been there. But I feel guilty wishing they were dead instead.”

Dickerson covered her hand with his. “It’s natural, Mindy. You didn’t know them.”

“I do know Mick Mulligan. He’s the dispatcher.” She tasted the tears. “He’s married, and he has two little girls.”

That thought caused a lurch within her, of fear, of renewed guilt, of raw grief. Dean had really wanted to have children. She was the one to put pregnancy off.

“Let’s wait a couple of years,” she’d coaxed. “Let’s be selfish and just have each other for a while first.”

Quinn said explosively, “What if it was a setup? Goddamn it, Dickerson! Let me work this one.”

“Go home. Go to bed.”

A vast, terrifying emptiness swelled within Mindy. They’d both leave any minute. She’d be alone in the house. It was a big house, bigger than she liked, with a cavernous three-car garage and bedrooms they didn’t use, a den and a family room. She could feel those empty, dark rooms around her, echoing her inner fear.

She made a sound—a sniff, a gulp. Still engaged in their argument, both men turned their heads to look at her. She looked down at her hands, clutching the comforter.

“We can’t leave her alone.” Quinn sounded irritated. “I’ll stay.”

That brought her head up. “No! You don’t have to.” But she wanted him to stay. He made her feel safe, and tonight she was terrified of being alone.

His mouth, she’d have sworn, had a faint curl. “If you don’t have a friend you can ask to come over, I do have to stay.” He sounded as if he were talking to a five-year-old who had just announced that she could walk across town all by herself to Grandma’s house. His gaze left her; she was dismissed. To Dickerson, he said, “You’ll keep me informed?”

Mindy shrank into her comforter, wishing she had the spine to stand up, say with dignity, “No, thanks, I’d like to be alone,” and walk them to the door. She’d have been grateful for Quinn’s offer if it had come from anyone but him, or even if he’d made it more kindly. He’d always had a talent for making her feel small.

Her care settled, Sergeant Dickerson expressed his sympathy and regret one more time, then left. Quinn walked him to the door, and they stood out of earshot talking for several minutes, their voices a rumble.

Finally Quinn locked up behind the sergeant and came back to her. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“No!” She shuddered. “No. I can’t get in our bed.”

“The guest room, then.”

She didn’t want to go to bed at all. Did he really imagine that she’d lay her head on the pillow and fall into blissful slumber? In the dark, all she would do was imagine a thousand times what had happened to Dean. Had the shot come from nowhere? Or had he been held at gun-point, threatened, beaten? Did he know he might die? She both wanted and didn’t want to know. I’m a coward, she thought. She would lie there wondering what would happen tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.