The Lost - J. D. Robb [36]
“This isn’t your system, Eve. These things have their own laws, their own system, and too many of those pockets inside them don’t quibble about letting a child be tortured, don’t lose sleep over ordering the death of a child to reach the goal of the moment.”
She took a long sip. “I can justify it. I can justify what I just did because I know that’s true. It’s not my system. I can justify it by knowing if Buckley had gotten the upper hand yesterday, Carolee Grogan would be dead, and that kid waiting for his mother outside the door would be blown to pieces along with dozens of others. I can justify it knowing if I arrested him, I would be killing him.”
She picked up the disc from her desk, and remembering what he’d once done for her, snapped it in two. “Don’t let him come here again.”
He shook his head, then framed her face and kissed her. “It takes more than skill and duty to make a good cop, to my way of thinking. It takes an unfailing sense of right and wrong.”
“It’s a hell of a lot easier when they don’t overlap. I have to get my report together and contact the commander. And for God’s sake, get that boomer out of the house. I don’t care if it is diffused.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Alone, she sat down to organize her notes into a cohesive report. She glanced over when the cat padded in, with Summerset behind him.
“Working,” she said briefly, then frowned when he set a plate with an enormous chocolate chip cookie on her desk. “What’s this?”
“A cookie, as any fool could see. It’ll spoil your dinner, but . . .” He shrugged, started out. He paused at the door without turning around. “He was a hero at a time when the world desperately needed them. He would be dead before the night was over if you’d taken him in. I want you to know that. To know you saved a life today.”
She sat back, staring at the empty doorway, when he’d left her. Then she scanned her notes, the report on screen, the photographs of the dead. They were the lost, weren’t they? All those lives taken. Maybe, in a way that nudged up against that line between right and wrong, she was standing for the lost.
She had to hope so.
Breaking off a hunk of cookie, she got back to work.
The Dog Days of Laurie Summer
PATRICIA GAFFNEY
For Jolene,
who’s always allowed
on the furniture
Before
I have a strange story to tell.
Too bad there’s no one to tell it to. No real way to tell it, and by now, no compelling reason to, either. Still. I feel the need to get it off my chest. Already it’s beginning to blur at the edges, fray in my mind like a dream in the morning. If I’m going to tell it at all, I’d better tell it quickly.
That’s what I’ll do, then: I’ll tell the story to myself.
Where to begin? With my childhood? When I married Sam and we had Benny? When I landed the broker job at Shanahan & Lewis? But those were all normal stages, unremarkable. They followed acceptable patterns; they were to be expected.
Better to begin when things started to go off track. Faster, more interesting. Well, that’s easy—that would be the day I drowned. The first time.
Such a nice day, too. Early June, late afternoon, our first full weekend at Sam’s cabin on the river. Our cabin, but I thought of it as Sam’s—he was the one who’d found it, dreamed of restoring it, and generally yearned for it, until I surprised him on his thirty-eighth birthday and bought it for him. Us. It needed an enormous amount of work, but it was habitable, barely, and even though it wasn’t my idea of paradise, I had to admit it did look charming that afternoon, with the windows blazing orange, the low sun casting tree shadows on the rough planks and the dirty white chinking. We were watching it from aluminum lawn chairs in the fast-m oving shallows of the Shenandoah, Benny sprawled across my lap, half asleep after the long day. “To you,” I toasted Sam with a last sip of wine. “To your project for the next ten or twenty years.”
“To us,” Sam toasted back with his beer, and I hoped