Hold on to Me (26 page)

It was starting again, he was certain of it. A full-moon night for sure. “I’m outside the station. Why?”

“Got a 10-10 out at the Rite Aid parking lot. Chris is busy and I’d rather not deal with Jed Stinson without backup.”

Yeah, Jed had probably been drinking and more than likely it would turn out to be a domestic disturbance instead of a reported fight. “10-4, 10-76.”

He slapped both hands against his thighs and stood. “I’ve got to go.”

A ghost of a smile curved her mouth as she rose to stand beside him. “I figured as much.”

Her hair was ruffled, more disheveled than he’d ever seen her, and he reached out, tucked a stray lock behind her ear. “Go get some sleep and I’ll see you in the morning.”

Her startled gaze jerked to his, fear and questions in the green depths. “You’re not…I thought…”

“Not tonight.” He caressed her damp cheek, trying to pick his words. He didn’t want to hurt her but at the same time he wanted to crawl into a deep, dark hole, alone. “I need…”

“Time to deal.”

“Yeah.” His relief and gratitude blended into the single syllable.

She leaned up, let her lips linger over his and folded him in an intense embrace, as if she wanted to never let go. “Be careful.”

“You, too. Now let me go cover Jeff’s sorry self.”

“I’m gonna sue your ass, Tick!”

“Go ahead.” Tick threw the lock on the holding cell with an audible clang. A monster headache pounded at his temples, along his forehead and over the top of his head and Jed’s incensed screaming wasn’t helping. “I have liability insurance.”

“I got rights.” Jed slumped on the bottom bunk and glared with bleary eyes. “The law’s on my side.”

“Yeah?” Tick hitched a hip on the stool at the intake counter and started filling out his arrest report. “What law’s that?”

“Georgia law says I can beat my wife.”

He closed his eyes, spots dancing across his lids. Sweet Jesus save him. He really wished the legislature would take that archaic little legal loophole off the books.

“That’s on Friday night with a twelve-inch stick, Jed-boy. Not midnight on Monday with your fists in the Rite-Aid parking lot.” He rubbed a hand over his sore jaw. Jed had good aim for a drunk. Why did the idiot always have to put up a fight? “And the law don’t say anything about letting you pop me one.”

Jed hiccupped. “’s Tuesday.”

“Yep, it is.” He scrawled his signature at the bottom of the form and dropped it in the basket. “Night, Jed.”

“Screw you.”

“Whatever.” He trudged upstairs to the squad room. From up the hall, he could hear Maggie Stinson at the front desk, already trying to bail Jed out. Some things never changed. At least he’d finished the paperwork this time before she showed up.

“You headed home?” In the squad room, Jeff tilted back in his desk chair; Chris Parker leaned against the coffee counter, drinking a canned soda.

“Yeah.” As soon as he found the bottle of sipping whiskey he’d carried around with him for the last ten years or so. The couple of long necks in his fridge weren’t going to take the edge off tonight.

He pushed open his office door and frowned. Where’d he put it, anyway?

“You look rough,” Chris called after him.

“Thanks.” He dragged the dust-coated banker’s box from beneath the credenza and lifted the lid. He grabbed the bottle of Ol’ Ezra Del had given him upon his graduation from the police academy and shoved the box back in its spot.

An anger bordering on fury simmered under his skin and he had nowhere to direct it.

The Texas Department of Corrections had Benjamin Fuller locked up for two to twenty and Tick doubted they’d give him face-to-face alone time with the guy.

He needed to punch someone, to destroy something.

He’d settle for getting good and drunk.

Leaving his handheld in the charger, he settled his cap on his head, tucked the bottle under his arm and returned to the squad room. “I don’t care what else goes on tonight. If you need anything, call Stanton.”

Chris chuckled. Jeff’s gaze locked on the bottle of whiskey. “What are you doing?”

“Going home to get wasted. And I don’t want to be disturbed. Got that?”

Jeff jumped to his feet. “I’ll walk out with you.”

Tick headed for the side door. “This is not a good time.”

The younger man followed him into the muggy night, his shoes clattering on the worn concrete steps. “It might help to talk about it.”

Pulling his keys from his pocket, Tick slanted him a disbelieving look. Since when did Jeff think he was Tick’s confidant? “Thanks for the offer.”

“This has to do with Agent Falconetti, doesn’t it?”

Tick paused in the act of unlocking his truck. The anger he was trying so hard to bank flared hotter, sending tendrils along his veins, heating his neck and ears. “Jeff. I’m serious. Not a good time.”

“You haven’t been yourself since she’s been here.”

That sounded like Stanton. Tick jerked the door open and tossed the bottle across the cab onto the passenger seat. “Don’t kid yourself. You might be dating my sister and working in my department, but you don’t know me that well.”

“You’d be surprised.” Confidence strengthened Jeff’s voice. “I know it’s not normal for you to be tied in knots like this all the time, to have to rein in your temper like you did with Jed earlier.”

Jeff had better be glad he was reining it in now. His jaw ached from being clenched so hard. Hell, his whole head hurt from how hard he was grinding his teeth together. “I appreciate the effort, Schaefer. I realize at this point I’ll be looking at you across Mama’s table on a regular basis. But I’m not discussing this with you. Not tonight. Not ever. It’s none of your goddamn business.”

“Don’t you think we’d all be better off if she’d finish her damn profile and go back to Virginia?”

“No.” He spun to thrust a trembling finger in Jeff’s face. “But I think we’d both be better off if you get the hell away from me tonight.”

An arrogant smirk bloomed over Jeff’s features. “See what I’m talking about?”

He would not take a swing at him. If he took one, he’d want another, would take all the aggression screaming in him out on the other guy and Tori would never forgive him. He turned, climbed behind the wheel and fired the engine. “Goodnight, Jeff.”

The fury shadowed him all the way home.

He didn’t even bother to go inside but stalked down to the dock. Once there, with the river whispering around him, he slouched in one of the Adirondack chairs and broke the seal on the whiskey.

The sipping alcohol sizzled into his gut, doing little to kill the smoldering rage, to drown the keening anguish.

He would’ve had a son. Probably a dark-haired, dark-eyed little boy who looked like all the rest of his mother’s grandchildren.

But different, special, because it was
his
child.

His and Caitlin’s.

She’d carried his child, growing and moving under her heart. She’d wanted that baby, he’d heard it in her voice earlier. If things had been different, if Fuller hadn’t…hell, the pain and confusion of the last few months would have been filled with joy and love instead.

He tossed off another long swallow.

Fuller had stolen that from them and there wasn’t a damn thing Tick could do about it.

And he most likely wouldn’t be able to give her another child to ease the sorrow, either.

Dealing with the loss of the baby he’d never had a chance to hold was hard enough. Dealing with the loss of those future possible children made it worse.

Was this what losing his brother had been like for his parents?

He still remembered those desolate days after Will’s death in a hunting accident. His father had been torn between comforting his devastated mother and trying to reach Del, who’d been mired in grief and misguided guilt.

One night Tick had found his father—his strong, invincible father—on his knees in the living room, Bible open on the couch before him, sobs shaking his sturdy frame.

Tick wished he could cry. Instead, the grief sat like a frozen knot in his chest.

He tilted the bottle up again. His eyes watered with the burn this time.

Another trickling swallow of Ol’ Ezra scorched his raw throat. His fingers were going all tingly-numb. That had to be a good sign. Maybe if he drank enough, the rest of him would go numb, too. He slouched further in the chair and took one more pull.

His eyelids dropped closed and he relaxed, the bottle slipping in his grip. He startled, catching it before it slid to the dock and shattered. His head spun and he rubbed a thumb over the raised relief on the bottle. Drinking on a near-empty stomach probably wasn’t the best idea he’d had in a while.

He set the bottle by the chair. Beneath the wood slats, water rushed and murmured. He scuffed the toe of his shoe over a bent nail. Probably he or Del had driven that crooked nail, during the summer his father had repaired the dock for his grandparents. A smile pulled at his mouth. He’d been ten, Del nine, and they’d probably been more hindrance to Daddy than anything else.

Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He wasn’t going to show that baby how to place a nail between the teeth of a comb to hold it for the hammer. He wasn’t going to teach him to fish or fuss at him to be still in the pew on Sunday morning. He wouldn’t set him down in Lloyd Beall’s barbershop chair for a first haircut or take him down the red clay stretch of Old Bainbridge Road for his first time behind a steering wheel.

“Lord, help me,” he whispered. The rustling water caught the anguished plea and carried it away. How was he supposed to deal with fathering a child, but never being that boy’s daddy?

Tick jerked awake and recoiled from the light bouncing off his ceiling. His eyes stung and his mouth tasted fuzzy and dead. With a groan, he rolled over and buried his face in the other pillow.

A soft, unique smell tickled his nose. Caitlin…the spicy shampoo she used blended with the scent of her skin.

Loss swept through him again, and he closed his eyes, teeth clenched. The action worsened the pounding in his head. He had to get up, get dressed, get going.

He stumbled from the bed, his brain protesting the too-quick movement. Trying to focus his thoughts on the case, he showered and donned a black suit, the somber color matching his disposition. In the kitchen, he ate a bowl of microwaved grits and drank a glass of milk while standing up, his mind circling despite his best efforts to concentrate. He kept coming back to the same place, exactly where he didn’t want to be.

Why did he feel like he’d lost everything? He hadn’t. He had his family, his job, his friends.

He had Caitlin. He was fairly sure of that.

But he still felt like a dog who’d been kicked one too many times.

Depression plaguing him, he placed his dishes in the dishwasher and left, locking the house behind him. He had an hour before he actually had to be in the office and nothing was going to fall apart if he showed up on time rather than early.

At the crossroads, he turned left rather than continuing straight. Minutes later, he pulled into his mother’s drive and parked by her car.

Humidity saturated the still morning, trapping the muggy heat that promised to be suffocating before noon. His mother’s morning newspaper under his arm, Tick plodded up the side steps and let himself in. Blessed cool air washed over him as he opened the door.

“Mama?” He dropped the newspaper in her mail basket in the hall. The mingled scent of fresh-brewed coffee and cinnamon wafted from the kitchen.

“On the back porch.”

He poured a cup of coffee, filched a cinnamon roll from the pan on the counter and followed her voice to the screened room just outside. Her fat marmalade cat twitched an annoyed tail at him as he stepped over her. His mother sat on the glider, shelling peas into a large bowl.

“Lamar.” Affection suffused her face and he leaned over to hug her. She kissed his cheek, her embrace a sweet weight around his neck. “I’m very glad to see you.”

“You, too.” His eyes burned and he blinked, holding his cheek against hers before letting go. A rough breath rattled his body.

She patted the cushion beside her and shifted the bag of purple-hull beans closer to her thigh. He settled and let the smooth rhythm of her pulling strings and snapping ends soothe him. A soft rain of peas tinkled into the enamelware bowl on her lap. She didn’t speak, didn’t ask him any questions, and after he had finished the coffee and sweet roll, he picked up a handful of beans from the bag.

A fine mist cascaded over his fingertips when he snapped the first one, the clean acidic scent hitting his nostrils, bringing back a dozen memories of moments like this.

“Your father and I used to sit out here and talk over this very task. He said it let him think, having something to do with his hands.” She patted his leg above his knee. “You remind me so much of him.”

He smiled, a half-hearted gesture at best.

“I enjoyed having your Caitlin here Sunday.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“So maybe I’ll finally get to plan a big wedding for one of you?”

He winced. Since Del had eloped, Chuck had opted for a courthouse wedding, and Ruthie had married overseas, his mama had missed out on all the excitement of marrying off her children in style. “Mama, please don’t say that. Not today. We’re…nothing’s settled between us.”

She gave him a wry look. The paper bag rustled between them as she lifted another handful of beans. “Lamar, who do you think you’re talking to? You couldn’t fib to me when you were eight and broke your Aunt Maureen’s heirloom cake plate and it’s not working now. You look at that young lady the same way your father used to look at me.”

Another pat on his leg, this time with an affectionate squeeze. The silence descended around them again. Outside, birds fluttered around her feeders and down at the pond a duck plopped into the water, her ducklings following. A rope swing dangled from an oak tree, its edges a little threadbare. That swing had been Del’s idea and how many times had the four of them—Tick, Del, Will and Chuck—competed to see who could swing the farthest out into the water on a hot summer day?

The whole house had to hold memories he didn’t know about, memories of Will. Did they haunt his mother? Why did he feel like he’d be having those what-ifs about this baby forever?

“Mama, did it get any easier? Losing Will, I mean.”

Her hands never paused in the smooth strip, snap, zip of hulling peas. “Well, I don’t know if easier is the right word. Losing a child changes what normal is. Things never go back to the way they were. But time soothes, a little.”

He pushed another line of tiny peas into the bowl.

“After a while, you’re able to remember all the good times, the sweet times, again.” She tilted her head, gaze trained on the long thin beans in her hand. “But you know, somehow losing the baby was almost as bad as losing Will?”

He looked up sharply. “The baby?”

“Um-hmm. The one we lost.” She lifted her eyes, staring out across the rolling green lawn. “About a year after Ruthie was born, while your daddy was in training with the Marshall service. It was such a shock, because I’d had easy pregnancies with all of you and everything had been going well. I’d even felt her moving…when I miscarried, it was far enough along for them to tell me it would have been a girl.”

“I never knew that.”

She laughed, a bittersweet sound. “You were six, honey. I don’t expect you to remember.”

“That was the summer we spent all that time at Grandma’s. She said you weren’t feeling well.”

“You could say that.” Her voice was wistful. “It was like a big dark weight, losing that child. Now they’d call it a depression but pure old-fashioned grief is what it was. And it didn’t matter how many times people told me I had all of you still and that there could be other babies…oh, my, I grieved for that baby girl.”

He bent his head, eyes closed. “You said it was nearly as bad as losing Will.”

“I’d had the chance to love Will, to hold him, to raise him, when he died. I didn’t have any of that to cling to with that baby.” He felt her small shrug and heard the change in her tone when she spoke again. “But a few years later, along came Tori, completely unexpected and what a blessing and a joy the Lord sent us in her.”

An unwilling smile tugged at his mouth. “A joy, Mama?”

“Sometimes you have to look for your joy, Lamar Eugene.” She gave his leg one final pat. “And sometimes our greatest joys come out of our greatest pain.”

By the time he left his mother’s, he felt calmer and his headache had dissipated somewhat. He detoured by the courthouse to pick up warrants, and once he extricated himself from the clerk of court, it was after nine when he arrived at the office.

“Morning, Lydia.” He rapped a hand lightly on the front desk. “Stanton in his office?”

She nodded, passing him a thin stack of pink message slips. “He’s looking for you. And he’s on the warpath.”

“What else is new?” He leaned against the counter, flipping through his messages. He liked the fact that she held them and didn’t tape them to his door like the other dispatchers did, where God and everyone could see them. “What did I do this time?”

“I don’t think it’s you. The Thomas case was dismissed this morning because the evidence never made it out of the GBI lab.”

He shook his head. Underfunded, the GBI crime lab suffered under a massive backlog of cases, and Chandler County wasn’t the only one losing cases before they ever made it to trial because of it. “I guess that means our lab results from the Kimberly Johnson case haven’t come in, either.”

Lydia pursed her thin, heavily colored lips. “I think Agent Falconetti is working on that this morning. I believe she and Cookie have been communicating back and forth with Moultrie and Quantico. She’s taken over your office.”

“Thanks.” On his way through the squad room, he stopped at the soda machine. His body was screaming for nicotine, and he hoped a caffeine overload would appease the craving. So far, the nicotine jones was winning.

Cookie sat at his desk, laptop open, a legal pad before him, a pen between his teeth. “Yo, Lamar Eugene.”

“Hey.” He grimaced over the icy bite of cola as it hit his throat.

Cookie glanced at his computer screen, tapped a few keys and hit enter. “You look like shit.”

“Probably because I feel like it.” Tick drained the soda in a couple of gulps. “Let me go see what bug is up Stan’s ass this morning.”

“Good luck. He’s loaded for bear. Jeff told him you went off last night.”

Great. Just freakin’ great.

Stanton’s door stood halfway open and Tick entered without knocking. “Heard about the Thomas case.”

“There’s got to be a better way. Like we build our own crime lab and hire the people to staff it.”

“While you’re dreaming there, Stanny-boy, let’s replace all of our units with brand new Chargers.”

Stanton didn’t smile. “What’s this I hear about you going off the deep end with Jeff last night?”

“I didn’t go off the deep end. I was in a lousy mood and he wanted to push a point. Quit worrying. I’m not going to kill your golden boy.”

“He’s a good cop. And tension between y’all will do more than damage morale, it’ll come between you and Tori if you’re not careful.”

“He needs to understand a line is a line if we’re going to work together, Stan.”

Stanton’s attention returned to the budget spreadsheet on his desk. “Still planning to go to Tallahassee today?”

“Yeah, right after we talk to Bobby Gene Butler. Cait wants to check out his story on Sharon Ingler’s car.”

Without looking up, Stanton nodded. “Good deal. And Tick?”

“What?”

“Try to hold it together.”

He wandered back out to the squad room and filled a mug with Cookie’s too-strong brew. Ill-temper settled over him, bringing his headache back full force. Damn it, he didn’t like Jeff running his mouth to Stanton. What had happened between them had been guy-to-guy, not cop-to-cop.

He dropped into Jeff’s chair opposite Cookie. Lord, the guy’s desk was too neat. If he lived like this, and he and Tori got serious, she’d drive him nuts with all her stuff. He sipped at the godawful coffee. He’d better face facts—his sister had brought the guy to Sunday dinner at Mama’s. She was already serious, despite anything she said to the contrary.

Shit, he didn’t like her dating Jeff. It stuck in his craw, bad.

He should have wiped that goddamn smirk off the son of a bitch’s face when he had the chance.

A quiet chime emanated from Cookie’s laptop. He glanced at it, sighed, punched some keys, hit enter and returned to studying his notes.

Tick shook his head. “What are you doing?”

“Talking to Falconetti. She’s harassing Botine over at the Moultrie GBI office by email. I suspect our labs will get moved to the top of the priority list if she doesn’t end up transferring them to the FBI. She’s harassing some guy up there about it, too. And we’re tossing ideas around about this database.”

“You’re instant messaging her?”

“Well, yeah. I couldn’t very well call her cell, could I? She still can’t find her phone. And wherever it is, it ain’t turned on. We tried to trace it by pings earlier. No luck.”

The tension knot in Tick’s neck tightened. “I thought she was in my office.”

“She is.” Cookie made a face. “But you don’t want me yelling this stuff across the room, do you? We’re multitasking.”

“You’re a nut is what you are.” Tick rose and returned Jeff’s chair to its customary just-so position. He picked up his mug.

Cookie rolled his gaze toward the ceiling. “She’s got the brother from Texas and the FBI guy from Virginia on voice chat, probably dealing with one of the two.”

“Do you know how ridiculous this is? You’re in the same building. She could just work out here and then y’all wouldn’t need the whole messaging thing. Hell, why don’t you use the conference room?”

“You mean the dungeon? Sitting in there gives me the creeps and I like technology. So shoot me.” Cookie shrugged. “And for some unfathomable reason, she likes you. Maybe that’s why she wanted to use your office, to soak in your aura or some crap like that. Now go away and let me think.”

Hard to argue with that. Tick gave him a light smack on the head and headed for his office. He tapped once and opened the door.

Eyes closed, legs crossed, Caitlin sat in his desk chair. Her laptop was open and an earpiece ran from the side to her ear. She made a moue of aggravation. “Vince. Stop. Being. An. Ass.”

At Tick’s entrance, she opened her eyes. After shutting the door, he set his coffee on the edge of the desk and reached for the files in his inbox, some of his tension falling away. He liked having her in his space.

“No. Because I said so.” She caught Tick’s gaze and rolled her eyes. She sighed and leaned her forehead on her hand. “You’re impossible.”