Protector - Laurel Dewey [33]
“Move!” Dale yells.
“No!” Jane shouts before shooting a thick wad of spit mixed with blood at her father’s face. Dale rears back, his rage at the boiling point. With all his strength, he pushes Jane forward into the workshop. She skids across the soft dirt floor on her shoulder. Dale closes the door behind him, whipping off his thick black belt. He lunges toward Jane and . . .
“Hey, you can’t park here!”
Jane snapped out of her daze and turned. A Denver patrol officer pounded on her window trying to get her attention. The heavy rain continued to fall relentlessly.
“This is a tow-away zone, ma’am! You have to move your vehicle!”
Jane, still in a daze, reached over and grabbed her badge. She slammed it hard against the driver’s window.
The patrol officer backed off. “Oh, sorry! I didn’t know!”
As the officer got back into his patrol car, the rain let up. Jane popped the Mustang in gear, Dale’s voice still screaming in the distance.
It was noon when Jane pulled in front of her house on Milwaukee. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her neighbor Hazel watering her lawn. Jane braced herself for the inevitable questions as she made her way to the front door.
“Home again so soon?” Hazel said, looking surprised. “Are you sick?”
“Not now, Hazel,” Jane said, unlocking her door and walking inside. Jane slammed the door behind her. She scooped the near empty fifth of Jack off the dining room table and took a swig as she made her way to the kitchen. Poking through the freezer, she pulled out a frozen macaroni and cheese dinner. It was covered in ice. Jane slammed it hard against the counter top, sending the chunks of ice flying across the kitchen. She shoved the frozen entree into the microwave, set the timer and headed down the hallway to her bedroom.
After shuffling through an eclectic tangle of CDs that ranged from country rock to classical selections including Pavarotti singing selections from Turandot and La Bohéme , Jane selected Grieg’s Peer Gynt and placed it into her CD player. As the haunting melody lay heavy in the bedroom, she set the bottle of whiskey on her dresser and kicked off her boots. Jane sat on the edge of her bed, staring into the void. She was a prisoner of her own head and she was the jailer. Unlocking the demons that raged inside her would be akin to lighting the fuse to a powder keg. Jane was sure of it. But the unholy trap of holding on to the discordant memories and sounds was proving equally dangerous. And now there was this new twist to the ongoing madness—this disorganized flash of images that hung just beneath her conscious mind. Jane flexed her right hand, recalling the tight, desperate grip of Emily Lawrence in the interrogation room. It was exactly the same wraithlike sensation she felt brush her hand as she stood in the stairwell at Headquarters. Jane, still blanketed in a slight daze, considered the most insane inference: the idea that she was sensing and seeing things that had yet to occur. She caught herself, almost embarrassed by her absurd reasoning. It was the booze. It had to be. No cop worth her salt would entertain such an insane notion unless said cop was going insane.
After a lunch of macaroni and cheese interspersed with hearty swigs of whiskey, Jane sorted through her notes on the Stover homicide. The hours passed quickly as she read and reread notations she’d all but committed to memory. However, after turning the last page on one of the yellow pads, a black pen fell from the center of the pad. A shock of emotion caught in Jane’s throat. The words: WOLF FACE were written in large capital letters over a crude drawing of a wolf’s face. At first, Jane feared that someone else had written the words and drawn the picture. But she quickly realized that it was indeed her own handwriting and novice attempt at artwork. Touching the drawing, Jane noted that the ink was still wet in spots where the pen had leaked. It was the same pen she had been using the night before when she passed out at the dining room table. But she