Don't Lose Her by Jonathon King Page A

“You stay optimistic, Diane, because you will see and hear so much of the evil in this world that if you don’t, it is too easy to lose faith in all mankind.”
    It had been her parents who guided her, through school, through college, and into law as she followed the family tradition. But she’d thought that she’d given up that inevitable link during her adulthood and had become her own person—which she’d achieved on her own. But now she questioned that independence. She wanted their help. She wanted Billy. She wanted someone to sweep in and rescue her, and the weakness was pissing her off. She had to gain back her strength and do something.
    The silence continued from the other side of the room. Her captor was there; she could feel the air from his breath. Use what you have, she thought.
    â€œCan I have some more?” she said. “I’m still very hungry.”
    She heard the creak of wood and felt the shift in the density of the space around her. She sniffed, trying to discern from the odor of cologne or sweat or breath something that would help her gain an image, an internal picture, an advantage. But all she gained was the feeling of fingers tipping her chin up and the straw beginning to probe again up under the hood.

Chapter 16
    I f I slept again, I wasn’t aware of it. After picking apart the case by her poolside, Sherry and I had lapsed into a silence that under other circumstances both of us would have enjoyed. Instead, she gave up on the neck massage, sat, and shared a second beer with me, and then excused herself to go to bed. I stared into the blue-green light and found myself waiting for one of the three cell phones next to me to ring, to call me to arms, to give me a direction or an enemy or a hope.
    At some point in the night, I caught myself massaging a dime-size disc of scar tissue at my neck, letting my fingertips glide over the unnaturally smooth skin, probing it, measuring it, remembering it and the day that bullet had ripped through skin and muscle and barely, just barely, missed my carotid artery.
    Being an officer of the law had seemed like a destiny for me, an odd sort of birthright, though emulating my father would never be a motivation. My career had been checkered. I was not smart. I was not ambitious. I was relatively big and athletic, not afraid of long shifts, and could always defeat boredom by studying people—their movements, routines, facial expressions, body language, and interactions with one another—which made me a good street cop, but not an internal climber.
    When I’d given up my short stint as a detective, I’d gone back to the streets, on a third shift walking a beat in Center City. When the shooting that ended my career occurred, I never even felt the first shooter’s round pierce my neck. They told me later that I continued to the storefront and on one knee actually turned over the body of the boy, pressing my hand to the hole in his skinny chest created by my exiting bullet.
    Later, in the hospital, commanders offered me a disability payout to leave the force, and after killing a child in the street, I agreed. I took the money, invested, and then moved to South Florida. I left the place and the profession that had formed me with the hopes that I could leave the past behind. But like every human with a modicum of self-actualization, I learned no one can bury the past deep enough. It is always there, scar tissue stirring the present.
    Before sunrise, the birds began to flit in the canopy above Sherry’s pool: wrens with their tea-kettle calls, mockingbirds with their loud clack , and the annoying green parrots, a colony of which had somehow taken up residence in the neighborhood and was known to go screeching through the trees like a bunch of squeeze toys.
    I got up, gathered my three phones, and went inside to take a shower. I grabbed something to eat out of the refrigerator and, as was my habit, I leaned across the