Last Breath (7 page)

“No,” she said softly, “it’s not so nuts.”
You dumped him
, Tanner’s voice reminded her,
and he hasn’t gotten over it.
“Except I’m not sure where you think it might lead.”

“It doesn’t have to lead anywhere.”

“As long as we’re clear on that.”

“We’re clear. So ... coffee?”

She had no desire for coffee. All she wanted was to go home and step into a hot shower. But she couldn’t disappoint him when he’d come all the way over here.

“Coffee it is,” C.J. said brightly.

“Man,” Tanner said, “she is really a hard case.”

Deputy Leonard Chang glanced at him from the passenger seat of the Chevrolet Caprice. The slums of Walnut Park blurred past in the slanting light of late afternoon. It was only four o’clock, but in January the days ended early.

“I take it,” Chang said, “you’re talking about Osborn again?”

Tanner saw the look on his partner’s face—a blend of irritation and boredom. He tried to justify himself. “She gets to me,” he managed.

“I noticed.”

“Okay, so I’m hot for her. I mean, come on, she’s got the whole package.”

“With that kind of sweet talk, you can sweep her right off her feet.”

“I didn’t mean ... When I say ‘the whole package,’ I’m talking brains, guts, attitude.”

“And looks.”

“Well, yeah. But not
just
looks. I’m not that shallow.”

“You’re not?”

“Well, I can be, but in this case there’s more to it.”

“Think she knows that?”

“Hell, sure she knows. I’ve told her how I feel.”

“Have you?”

“What are you, my shrink? I’ve asked her out—seventeen times by her count. I turn on the charm every time I see her.”

“Maybe you should turn off the charm and just be, you know, a regular guy.”

Tanner reflected on this. “It’s an idea.”

“Hardly original, but I’ll take the credit anyway.”

“Thing is, I’m not sure I can be just, you know, regular. When I’m around a woman, it’s like I’ve got to prove something. Like being just me isn’t good enough. Shit.” He chuckled. “You really
are
my shrink.”

“I’m charging a hundred bucks an hour, partner. Pony up.” Chang paused. “There might be another reason she’s not going for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe—well, maybe it’s because you’re SWAT.”

Tanner glanced at him, incredulous. “You kidding? SWAT is an asset, man, as you ought to know.” Chang was a member of Tanner’s SWAT call-up team. “Haven’t you ever used it for a pickup line?” Tanner dropped his voice an octave and intoned, “Yeah, baby, I’m a cop, all right—and I’m on the SWAT team. We go after the
real
bad guys.”

Chang was laughing. “Hell, with a line like that, what do you need Osborn for?”

“Guess I don’t,” Tanner said.

“So forget her.”

Tanner nodded. It was good advice, and he abided by it for all of thirty seconds before he turned to Chang. “Why’d you say that anyway? About SWAT?”

“I thought the plan was to forget her.”

“I’m just curious. I mean, who ever heard of a cop who’s got a problem with SWAT?”

“Some cops do.”

Tanner steered the Chevy Caprice onto Wilmington Avenue. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

“The hell it isn’t.” Tanner was getting ticked off now. He pulled up to a curb, parking the patrol car, and pivoted in his seat to face Chang. “What are you trying to tell me anyhow?”

Chang found a stick of gum in his pocket and took his time about unwrapping it and putting it into his mouth. Finally he answered, speaking around a wad of Bubblicious. “She came out of Harbor Division, didn’t she?”

“So what?”

The radio crackled with a priority call, but it was nowhere near their location and another unit took it.

“Come on. Rick,” Chang said. “Don’t you remember what went down in Harbor two, three years ago? The warehouse thing?”

“Oh,” Tanner said slowly. “Yeah.”

“She might have been there. Might have seen it.”

“I never thought of that.”

“That’s why I’m the brains here. Now let’s cruise, okay?”

Tanner nodded and pulled away from the curb, thinking.

The warehouse thing was one of the worst failures in the history of LAPD Metro’s D Platoon—the SWAT team. Three bank robbers armed with automatic rifles had been pursued into an industrial district outside of Long Beach, at the western edge of Harbor Division. Trapped, they took refuge inside a warehouse. But they didn’t go in alone. En route from the bank they carjacked a station wagon after crashing their van into an embankment. The four people in the wagon—father, mother, two kids—became hostages. The family of four went into the warehouse too.

It was a standoff. Classic hostage-barricade situation. Negotiations failed. Shots were heard inside the warehouse. There was fear that the hostages were being killed. SWAT went in.

The robbers, still heavily armed, put up massive resistance. When the firefight ended, two SWAT officers lay wounded, and the three bad guys lay dead.

And the family ...

Dead. All four.

They had died in the cross fire. Some nonlethal wounds had been inflicted by the robbers. But the fatal bullets had all been fired by D Platoon guns.

During the aftermath, almost every cop in Harbor Division had been at the scene. It was highly likely that C.J. Osborn saw the damage, up close and personal. She would have been new to the force back then, still a “boot”—a rookie. Her training officer would have explained to her that the robbers used the hostages as human shields, that it wasn’t the cops’ fault. But maybe she hadn’t bought it. And why should she?

Tanner had heard all the same excuses back then, and he hadn’t bought any of them either.

It was SWAT’s job to keep people alive. But who could believe it, after the fiasco at the warehouse? Only the same people who thought the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had done an A-1 job at Waco.

“You think that’s it?” Tanner asked quietly, sobered by the thought.

“Man, I don’t know.” Chang smacked the gum. “It’s a theory, that’s all. If you really care, ask her.”

“I just might.”

“Good for you. And if it all works out, I want to be best man at the ceremony.”

“Give me a break. I mean, I’m serious about her, but ... not
that
serious.” Tanner frowned. “Am I?”

Chang settled back in his seat. “You’re pretty slow sometimes, you know that? You don’t even know what’s going on in your own mind.”

“But you do, I guess? You can read me?”

“Like an open book, partner.” Chang laced his fingers behind his head and grinned through the wad of gum. “Like an open book.”

Down the street from Newton Station was a coffee shop run by Philippine immigrants. It was a hangout for cops, though it did less business than the local bars. Cops saw a lot of things that encouraged drinking. C.J. herself avoided alcohol, but she sometimes wondered how long her resolve could hold out against the daily assault of drive-bys and arson fires and craziness.

She led Adam to the coffee shop, past a legless beggar on the curb rattling a tin cup, an image out of Calcutta.

The shop was small and close and crowded. The air conditioner made a great deal of noise but produced little change in temperature. There were biscuit crumbs and horseflies on the Formica surface of the nearest available table. C.J. shooed the flies and sat down.

“Nice place,” Adam said with a wince as he settled into a wobbly-legged chair. “Come here often?”

“Believe it or not, I do. Mr. and Mrs. Salazar are good people.” She saw his questioning glance and added, “They run the place.”

“Keep it nice and clean too.” Adam swept some of the crumbs away with his sleeve.

“They don’t have enough help. This is the busiest time of the day—right after shift change.” She caught Mrs. Salazar’s eye and held up two fingers. “Two lattes,” she explained to Adam. “That okay?”

“Sure.”

“It’s the best thing they serve. Stay away from the frappuccino.”

“I’ll remember that if I ever bring a client here.”

She indulged him with a laugh. “I guess it’s not the greatest place in town, but you know, I’m used to it.”

“How long has it been since you transferred to Newton?”

“A year. I moved over here just after—well, you know.”

“After you filed for divorce.”

“Right.”

“You can say the words, C.J. I’m a big boy.” He leaned back in his chair, which creaked ominously. “You know, I used to think you were nuts.”

“Did you?” She felt a spasm of irritation at him and hid it behind a smile. “How so?”

“Doing this job. When I hear gunshots, I run the other way. You go
toward
them. There’s a certain element of insanity in that behavior, don’t you think?”

“We can’t all be lawyers,” she said peevishly.

“I’m not being confrontational. I just mean, what you do is so foreign to me. Always has been.”

“Sometimes it feels foreign to me too. When I hear gunshots, I’d
like
to run the other way, just like you.”

“But you don’t. I admire that. I don’t profess to understand it, necessarily—but I admire it anyway.”

The compliment silenced her. She was not accustomed to kindness from him.

The caffe lattes arrived, carried by Mrs. Salazar. C.J. sipped the foam in silence and considered what Adam had said. Did he admire her? Had he ever? She suspected his actual feelings were closer to contempt—not for her alone, but for people in general, all those people who were not smart enough or flashy enough or suave enough to rise to the heights he was scaling. She might be wrong, though. She hoped so.

“C.J.?” Adam asked. “You still here?”

She looked up, remembering where she was. “Sorry. Guess you kind of startled me with that little testimonial.”

“I’ll take it all back if it makes you feel better.”

She smiled. “No, I liked hearing it. Except, you know, there are times when I think you might be right about the insanity part. I wonder if maybe there’s not a kind of death wish in what I do.” The words came out before she had time to consider them.

Adam leaned forward, frowning. “Crisis of confidence? That’s not like you.”

She wished she hadn’t said anything. But that was how it had always been with her and Adam—his simple presence seemed to bring out her innermost thoughts.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m not myself today, that’s all.”

“Why not?”

“Well, there was this situation—” She stopped herself, thinking, There I go again.

“Situation?”

“We don’t have to talk about this.”

“It’s okay,” Adam said.

She wondered if it really was okay—to open up to this man who had betrayed her. It felt wrong, and yet he was here, and she needed to talk to someone.

His blue eyes watched her, patient, waiting.

“It was a hostage situation,” she said slowly. “My partner had called for backup. We should’ve waited for SWAT.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No.”

“You and your partner went into some kind of SWAT situation without backup?”

“Not my partner. Me.”

“Alone?”

“Yup.”

“Christ, when you said you had a death wish—” He cut himself off. “Sorry, that didn’t come out too well.”

“It came out fine. You’re right. It was a stupid thing for me to do. Except, see, there was a child involved. And I thought he’d be safer if I went in alone.”

“Isn’t SWAT trained to handle these things?”

C.J. looked away. “Their training doesn’t always work out so well in the real world. I didn’t want a bloodbath in there.”

“Bloodbath?”

“It happens.” She had never told him what she’d seen at Harbor Division, and she wasn’t going to share it with him now.

“I thought SWAT were the elite, the pros.”

“They are. But ... well, sometimes things go wrong. You know, everybody says this city is a war zone, and they’re right. But maybe we shouldn’t fight on those terms—or at least we shouldn’t be so gung ho about it. These SWAT guys—you haven’t seen them. They get all dressed up in their paramilitary duds, and they go in with their machine guns and their flash grenades, and civilian casualties become acceptable losses....”

She realized she was babbling and shut up.

“Is the kid okay?” Adam asked after a short silence.

“He’s fine.”

“And you?”

“Didn’t lose any fingers”—she waved her hands at him to demonstrate—“or toes, or any other vital parts.”

“You shouldn’t take risks like that, C.J.”

Someone has to, she almost snapped at him, but she knew her anger was inappropriate, an aftereffect of stress. “Well,” she said lightly, “it turned out all right, anyhow. You know, I hate talking shop. Let’s change the subject.”

“Fair enough.” Adam finished his latte and set down the mug. “How about Emmylou Harris?”

“Emmylou Harris?”

“You still like her?”

“Sure,” she answered warily.

“Well, she’s playing at a club in the Valley. Some honky-tonk cowboy saloon, the kind we used to go to. How about it?”

She was grateful to have an excuse. “Sorry, I can’t. Tonight’s my volunteer work, remember? Every Wednesday night, at the junior high, the at-risk kids program—”

“I’m not talking about tonight. I meant this Friday.”

“Oh.” Her excuse evaporated.

“Come on, let’s do it. You and me, sipping some brewskis, listening to some C ’n’ W from the pre-Shania era.”

Her heart sped up a little, and she realized that what she felt was fear. “That sounds almost like a date.”

He sensed her alarm and tried to wave it away. “No, not a date. A little reunion, that’s all. You know, for old times’ sake. Frankly, I wouldn’t have brought it up, except there’s nobody at the firm who goes in for country-western, and I hate going to a show alone.”

Is that it? C.J. wondered. Or is it that you hate being alone, period?

“Maybe she’ll play our song,” she said quietly, watching Adam closely to gauge his reaction.