Dark Blue (South Island PD Book 1) (4 page)

A high-pitched cry echoed from down the hall, the reedy wail of a newborn.

Jackson tensed, his heart slamming against his ribs as disgust settled over him, thick as molasses.

Kate turned immediately, taking half a step backward. Now, she looked back and forth between Jackson and the hallway, where the baby must’ve been sleeping before Sanders’ yelling had woken it.

“Is anyone hurt?” Jackson asked. “The baby, or any other kids?”

Kate shook her head, then dropped her gaze. “There are no other kids. It’s just us.”

It was something to be grateful for, but it wasn’t enough. How long did that baby have before its father started beating on it too?

It’d happen, of that Jackson was certain. Unless someone put an end to this before it reached that point.

“Tell me what happened,” he said, watching Sanders and his wife at the same time.

“I told you, nothing fucking happened.” Sanders glared at him as if he were the densest idiot on Earth.

Jackson ignored him.

Kate’s voice was so low it could barely be heard over the baby’s crying. “He got mad and hit me.”

She kept her gaze down and turned her palms up, as if there was nothing more to say.

“With his fist?”

She nodded, moisture making the red, puffy skin below her eyes shine.

“How many times?”

She held up two fingers. “My stomach. It … it wasn’t the first time.”

Sanders snorted. “You don’t actually believe this shit, do you Calder?”

He met Sanders’ gaze and saw the hatred there.

“She’s pissed at me. Who the fuck knows why? You know how women are – always bitching about something.”

Kate flinched and shrank in on herself even further. She didn’t look pissed, just scared.

“I don’t hear her giving you a hard time about anything.” Jackson made a real effort to keep his voice level, as if he were talking to a run-of-the-mill loser instead of a sworn officer whose badge was probably resting on his dresser.

Sanders’ face went a deeper shade of red. “I didn’t touch her. You wanna know why she’s so upset, ask her about her damned boyfriend. Maybe he hits her, or maybe she’s pissed that she has to see my face when she gets home from their little dates – I don’t fucking know.”

Sanders’ story changed as quickly as the color of his face, which was bordering on purple now.

Kate flinched again. “I don’t have a
boyfriend
, Greg! How many times do I—”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up, Kate.”

The newborn’s screaming reached a higher pitch, and Jackson half expected the neighborhood dogs to start howling.

“I have to feed the baby,” Kate said, taking another step backward. Tears were streaming freely down her face, though she didn’t sob. She’d had plenty of practice weathering pain in silence, Jackson was sure.

“He hit you, and you want to press charges,” Jackson summarized before she could walk away.

“Yes.” She was trembling.

“You heard her, Sanders. Come on.”

He’d made his decision silently, as Kate had cried and her husband had raged. Her silent fear stood in stark contrast to Sanders’ venom, and Jackson recognized the disparity. When you lived with a tyrant who wasn’t afraid to get physical, you tried to keep your head down – tried to keep them from blowing up. Letting them see your pain only fueled them.

It was what they wanted – to make you hurt. To punish you for existing, for problems that had nothing to do with you. You were there, and you were their punching bag.

Sanders gaped. “Jesus, Calder. You serious? I can’t believe you’re that fucking stupid and I haven’t heard about it yet. How many years you been with the department?”

“I’m taking you in. You know how this goes, and you know I have to do it. Don’t make it any harder than it has to be.”

He couldn’t ignore Kate’s cry for help. It’d probably taken her years to get to this point, to reach out for help. If he turned his back on her, he’d crush whatever faith she had in other people and whatever will she had to escape the cycle of abuse.

For a second, Sanders looked as if he might do anything. Throw a punch, even go for Jackson’s weapon. But as the baby’s crying died down, he looked Jackson straight in the eye, his whiskey breath coming in hard bursts.

“You’re gonna fucking regret this, Calder.”

Jackson drew the cuffs from his duty belt and reached for Sanders’ wrists. He almost had the first one secured when Sanders moved.

He jerked with surprising speed, escaping the cuff and turning on Jackson. In a split second, he threw a punch.

Jackson barely dodged it, stepping to the right, his shoulder colliding with Sanders’.

Sanders grunted, releasing a cloud of stale liquor breath. The smell triggered a hundred shitty memories, but Jackson pushed them out of his mind so all that remained was a feeling of disgust.

For a few seconds, he and Sanders wrestled. They had the same training, and there was no doubt that Sanders knew exactly what Jackson was trying to do and purposely made it difficult. But Sanders was clumsy with anger and intoxication.

Jackson forced him against a wall and cuffed his hands behind his back.

“Stupid fuck,” Sanders huffed, his cheek against the wood paneling.

Kate appeared in the hallway, a bundle of blue blankets cradled against her chest. Jackson caught her big, dark eyes as he pulled her husband away from the wall and turned him toward the front door.

She didn’t seem surprised by the struggle.

Sanders cursed her and spent the walk out to the cruiser alternating between continuing to verbally abuse her and telling Jackson how stupid he was.

“You son of a bitch,” he said as Jackson pushed his head down into the car, “you know domestics are bullshit. You’re gonna regret this.”

Jackson shut the cruiser door.

How had he served on the same force with such a piece of shit and not realized it until today?

* * * * *

Jackson cracked open a beer, and the memory of Sanders’ whiskey breath hit him like a ton of bricks.

He compartmentalized, filing the memory away as he sank down onto a kitchen chair and took a long drink from the bottle.

He could’ve downed something much stronger, but it was all he had. After peeling off his sweaty uniform and vest, though, nothing tasted better than a cold beer anyway. Wearing Kevlar in South Carolina during August was like walking around with your own personal sauna on your back.

“Shit.” Elijah strode into the kitchen, past the table and straight to the fridge. “I smell more like one of the transients down at the bus station than a cop. So do you, by the way.”

His roommate opened the fridge and pulled a beer from the case shoved into one corner of the top shelf.

“This time of year, there’s not much of a difference between transients and cops, at least as far as body odor goes.”

In uniform pants and a visibly damp t-shirt, Elijah took the seat opposite Jackson. There were only two chairs at their small kitchen table, but it was all they needed. On the rare occasions anyone else came over, there were a couple barstools at the nearby island.

Elijah snorted. “Best kept secret of law enforcement. We should use it to our advantage, somehow – weaponize it. Sweat’s cheaper than bullets.”

“You think you could’ve taken down that meth head last week with your stench alone?”

Elijah grinned. “Only one way to find out. Next time some junkie takes a swing at me with a steel pipe, I’m taking off the vest instead of reaching for the Taser.”

“You’ll get your skull caved in.”

Elijah shrugged. “Chicks dig scars.”

“You’re just sick of everyone on the platoon calling you Baby Face.”

At twenty-seven, Elijah was only two years younger than Jackson, but there was no denying which one of them looked younger. Not that the veneer of extreme youth stopped Elijah from drawing female attention like a magnet.

He was well over six feet tall and had the muscle to match. Despite his words, he spent more time lifting weights and hitting the beach than dating. No matter how much sun he got, his light brown skin stayed smooth and flawless, hence the Baby Face moniker.

Jackson didn’t envy Elijah’s college kid look, but his ability to tolerate the sun well was a different story. As a strawberry blond, Jackson had to lather on sunscreen every spring and let a tan build naturally on the exposed areas of his skin before he was safe from easy burning. Island living was rough on skin as fair as his, and it’d been a pain in the ass back when he’d been working construction.

“Rogers is the one who started that Baby Face crap,” Elijah said, “and she’s just jealous. Spent too much time lying out on the beach trying to tan that lily-white skin and got those premature crow’s feet.”

Elijah and Rogers had had a rivalry going on ever since the academy. Jackson had gone through it with the two of them and had witnessed the root of it all: the moment Elijah had accidentally hit Rogers in the calf with a Taser.

No matter how profusely he’d apologized, she’d never forgiven him.

“The other day, she asked me what kind of moisturizer you use,” Jackson said. “I told her I didn’t know, and she offered to slip me a twenty if I went through your bathroom drawer and reported back to her.”

“Seriously?” Elijah met Jackson’s eyes over his beer bottle.

“No.”

Elijah succumbed to rough laughter that was at odds with his pretty-boy face. When it faded, the air of joviality died with it.

“Heard you brought in Sanders today.” Elijah bounced his bottle cap on the table’s glass surface.

“Yeah.”

Elijah’s hazel eyes went dark as he frowned. “He really beating up on his wife?”

Jackson shot his best friend a hard look. Elijah knew he wouldn’t have brought him in if he hadn’t been sure. “He hit her twice in the stomach. She just had a baby, too.”

“Shit.”

He nodded. “Sanders looked like he was about to shit bricks when he realized I was going to charge him.”

Jackson knew very well there were officers who wouldn’t have. So did Elijah. It was illegal for anyone with a domestic violence conviction to possess a gun – if Sanders was convicted, he wouldn’t be able to keep his job.

“Hey, it’s the thin blue line, not the black and blue wall of silence,” Elijah said. “Fuck anyone who thinks otherwise.”

“There are too many people who think otherwise.” Integrity was one thing. Loyalty was another. Putting cuffs on someone who was supposed to have your back felt like having your moral compass torn in two.

“Someone’s gotta be the change.”

“You sound like a motivational poster.”

More laughter. “I bet Sanders was pissed when you brought him in.”

“Yeah, he seemed sure I’d regret arresting him. He even threw a punch.”

“It land?”

“No. He was either drunk or hungover – clumsy.”

“You charge him for assaulting you and resisting arrest?”

“No. It’d be my word against his, and that was a can of worms I didn’t want to open. Figured I’ll get enough shit over arresting him in the first place.”

“Well, the charges for what he did to his wife are there. And he can say what he wants – that shit would never fly with the lieutenant.”

“I know.” Anyone under their lieutenant’s charge knew she’d never turn a blind eye to actions like Sanders’. “But she’s not the one out on the streets who’s supposed to have my back, and Sanders isn’t in our platoon anyway.”

“So you don’t have to deal with Sanders or any of his buddies. Not unless you have to arrest him again, anyway.”

“Fuck that. Someone else can take the call.” He said it, but he didn’t mean it. He’d do it all over again if he had to. Letting someone else take the call might mean letting Sanders get away with it.

Elijah nodded, and silence filled their shared apartment.

“You sticking around tonight?” Elijah asked after a while.

“Yeah. Why?” He had work the next morning. All he wanted to do was grab a shower and some food and zone out in front of the TV with the AC cranked high before going to bed.

“I’m thinking of ordering in some Thai. You were MIA last night, and I had to finish off a pizza by myself.”

“I thought you were into cooking healthy instead of ordering in. That phase over already?”

“You know I only cook on my days off. I’d been making big batches of food to last through the week, but I didn’t have time this week since I ended up getting called in for overtime on my last day off.”

“So, a whole pizza – really milking it for all it’s worth, huh?”

Elijah shrugged. “They were having a special – a large one topping for eight bucks. Not like I was going to pass that up, especially with what we get paid. And you’re one to talk, anyway – all you cook is bacon.”

“I buy those fresh rotisserie chickens from the deli – that’s almost cooking.”

Elijah gave him a look of disbelief. “No, it’s not.”

“Well, whatever. I’m up for Thai. No plans tonight.”

“Last night not go so well?”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw the receipt from the florist on the counter. You went on a date, and you came home early.”

Jackson rolled his eyes. “You trying to make detective?”

“Hey, you left it lying out.”

“I wasn’t on a date.”

“Treating yourself to a fresh-cut bouquet?”

“The flowers were for an old friend. Figured I owed her something.”

“Why?”

“Caught her flying over the bridge yesterday and wrote her a ticket.”

For a second, Elijah stared, his eyes narrowing to laser focus. Then he burst into laughter.

Jackson frowned.

“You’re fucking serious, aren’t you?”

Elijah didn’t wait for Jackson to answer. “No wonder you didn’t get any. You dug your own grave, man.”

“I didn’t know it was her when I pulled her over.”

Elijah shook his head. “Only you, I swear. Do yourself a favor and don’t waste any more money trying to get back in that chick’s good graces. It’s not gonna happen. Only hope you have of seeing her again is in court.”

Jackson shifted in his chair, irritation chafing at him.

“We go way back. She’s not petty enough to get her panties in a bunch over a ticket.”

“You honestly believe that, don’t you? You’re gonna end up old and alone.”

“At least I’ll have you for company, Casanova.”

“Say what you want. If I meet someone I think would make a better roommate than you, you can be damn sure I won’t write her a ticket.”

Jackson pushed back his chair. “I’m grabbing a shower.”

“If you use all the hot water because you’re in there fantasizing about that woman, I’m gonna be pissed. She’s out of your reach.”

“I used to think so,” he said, heading down the hall, “but I was wrong.” He paused by the bathroom door. “You should see her. She could’ve had anyone – still could.”