Jaded (12 page)

For the moment, however, Tanya got up, got something to eat, then walked. But as nothing changed, the need for the drug would simmer, then seethe in her system, and by night she’d be high again.

Lucas stepped onto the splintered porch, noted the muddy boots with gray wool socks tucked into the shanks next to the door, and red-and-black wool jacket hanging from a hook screwed straight into the cabin’s wall. He knocked, automatically scanning behind him while he waited for Tanya to open the door.

Her dishwater blond hair hung in lank strands around her face. She’d forgotten to shower for a few days, not a good sign, but her pupils were the correct size for the sunshine flooding into the cabin from the big windows overlooking the creek. She was barefoot, but he could see the imprint of her hiking socks in the skin of her feet. “Hey, Tanya,” he said.

“Hey, Chief,” she replied.

The dig stung. “Put your boots on,” he said. “We need to talk, and it’s too cold for you to stand out here without shoes.”

“You can come in,” she said liltingly.

Fuck this attitude bullshit. “Can I?” He held her gaze until it dropped. “I don’t want to arrest you today, Tanya. Put your boots on and come outside.”

She slammed the door behind her, movements jerky as she yanked the socks from the boots and stuffed her bare feet into them. Thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets, he waited for her on the grass beside the dirt road leading to the cabin.

“What do you want?”

He studied her again in the bright light of day. Not strung out enough to have trashed Gunther Jensen’s place, but he had to ask. Blood was blood, but crime was crime, and he worked for the citizens of Walkers Ford.

“Someone broke into Gunther’s house yesterday. Trashed it pretty thoroughly and took some cash. And his wife’s engagement ring he had planned to give to his granddaughter.”

Shock widened her eyes ever so slightly, a sight that eased his heart just a little. Addicts gone too far to recover didn’t care about anyone else. Compassion lived somewhere deep inside the bitter woman standing in front of him. “Was he home?”

“No. He was visiting Betty in the nursing home. Do you remember where you were yesterday?” Blacking out happened frequently to prescription drug addicts.

“Of course,” she said, just indignantly enough to sound hurt. Then the penny dropped. “You thought I did it. Because I did some work for Gunther, and I’m an addict and a user.”

He didn’t deny it. “His Percocet’s missing.”

“Fuck you, Lucas Ridgeway. Fuck you to hell.”

She spun around, but he grabbed her arm. “I had to ask. And if the roles were reversed, you’d have to ask, too.”

The look she slid him, sharp with pain and bright with tears, made him look away. Because she’d wanted his job. Years ago, when he was eighteen and she was fourteen, all she’d wanted was to become chief of police of Walkers Ford. She’d gone to Denver for college the same year he graduated from the academy. In the fall of her sophomore year, she tried to break up a fight in a bar she shouldn’t have been in, in the first place, and got her elbow broken in two places. She’d pushed her recovery too hard, too fast, requiring a second surgery. Even after months of physical therapy, she didn’t have the mobility she needed to pass the physical entrance exams for the academy. Then she got hooked on the prescription painkillers. He’d gotten busy at work and fallen head over heels for Leanne. He was struggling to find time for a relationship, let alone his cousin. Not even knowing one of Denver PD’s brightest prospects could save her. All her hopes and dreams died that night.

He stared at her, making the connection for the first time that she was around Alana’s age. Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight, too thin, frequently dead-eyed and always bitter.

“You never used to be mean,” she said.

He let her arm drop. She rubbed her elbow significantly, but wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“I didn’t break into Gunther’s place,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

“I didn’t.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“You have a hard time believing me when I tell you the truth.”

When he’d come back to Walkers Ford, she’d said she was clean; instead, he figured out she was getting pills from multiple doctors in four different counties. He’d called every doctor, clinic, and hospital in a two-hundred-mile radius and warned them not to prescribe for her. When she found out, she’d screamed at him for an hour. All he’d done was drive her to get drugs from illegal sources.

You’ve lied to me too many times
trembled on the tip of his tongue, but he held it back. “How’re you doing?”

She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked off into the distance. “Now this is a social call?”

“I still care,” he said.

“You used to care. Now you say it’s caring when you dial it in from Mars on a tin can attached to a piece of string. A kid died, Lucas. Big deal. Gangbangers die all the time and cops don’t shut down over it. They deal with it and move on. That’s the job. Dad said you don’t have the heart for police work.”

That should hurt. It was supposed to hurt, and at one time, it would have hurt. “I would have said you didn’t have the heart for it, either.”

He just stared at her until she dropped her gaze. “I’ll pay for treatment again.”

“I’ve got money,” she said.

“From where?”

“Mack Winston’s taking people hunting again,” she said. “He pays to use the land. My kind of work. I don’t do a goddamn thing, and I get paid.”

Back in the day, Tanya could run a six-minute mile. Back in the day, she’d turned every head in the precinct when she came to visit him. Back in the day, she’d do field-hand work during the day, stay out most of the night, then get up the next morning and do it all over again. She was built for work, hard work requiring muscle and brain. She was built to be a cop, and instead she walked the prairie and slept the day away and burned her brain cells with OxyContin.

“Did you see anything while you were out walking yesterday?”

“Near Gunther’s? No. I went the other direction, towards Brookhaven. I’m not using,” she said, looking him straight in the eye.

A lie, or she would have let him into the cabin. Which meant he couldn’t trust that she hadn’t broken into Gunther’s house, either. Frustration and regret cemented together in his gut. He put his hands on his hips and looked away. Nothing with Tanya was easy anymore. Nothing.

“Anything else?”

“You need anything?”

The words were out before he could stop them. She looked him over, taking in the badge on one hip, the gun holstered on the other. She would know his handcuffs were in a case at the small of his back. Standing in front of her wearing the signs of her shattered dream made the words a slap in the face.

To his utter shock, she didn’t launch herself at him, something she’d done when the drugs poisoned her system. A little smile, all the more devastating for the self-mocking edge to it, broke his heart. “Nothing you can give me, Lucas.”

Resignation was worse than her fury. He nodded toward the pickup. “How much to fix the transmission?”

“It’s fixed. I got it back a couple of days ago. I wasn’t kidding about Mack.” She shot him a glare, then turned and headed for the cabin. “Go away, Lucas. I didn’t steal from Gunther Jensen, and I don’t need anything from you.”

Fuck. Fuck it all. Lucas hauled open the Blazer’s door and thought about how good it would feel to pound on something. He picked up his cell phone and dialed the library.

“Walkers Ford Library, this is Alana. How can I help you?” The hint of laughter that lay under the pleasant words was a sound he hadn’t heard in what felt like a lifetime.

“Is it okay with you if I start demo on your kitchen tonight?”

A pause.

“It’s Lucas.”

“I know it’s you,” she said, and even over the phone line he could hear her cheeks heating. “You sounded . . . never mind. You don’t have to ask. You’re my landlord, the chief of police, and the guy I’m sleeping with.”

“None of those things give me permission to be in your house without your consent.”

“Go ahead. I have to run an errand after we close. I’ll be back at the house in a couple of hours.”

That would give him plenty of time to take measurements. “We’ll get supper in Brookings.”

“Brookings?”

“The location of the nearest home-improvement superstore,” he said. “Normally I’d shop local, but after the hardware store in town closed, that’s the best place to buy supplies.”

“Right. Of course. I’ll see you back at the house.”

Back at the house. She didn’t call it “home.” She didn’t even call it “her house.” She called it “the house” or “his house.” Because home was in Chicago.

He parked in his own driveway and greeted Duke. “Hey, buddy, you have a good day?” he crooned as the dog pranced and snuffled between his legs. A gentle scratching of Duke’s hindquarters sent fur flurries into the air. The dog was losing his winter undercoat. Lucas snagged the stiff-bristled brush and smoothed out his coat while Duke stretched.

Inside his house he changed into work jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and work boots, then grabbed his toolbox from the porch and crossed their adjoining driveways. As they had every year since his grandmother passed, the shoots and stalks extended from the carefully mulched beds lining the side of the house. The bushes grew on their own, a tangle of branches and thorns he’d let run wild. The year after his grandmother died, Mrs. Battle had come over and dealt with the beds, but last spring she’d had trouble shaking bronchitis.

His grandmother had welcomed him, the odd child out in a family of musical free spirits, because he cared about what she cared about: people, a place, a community. His grandfather and Uncle Nelson took him hunting, hiking, rock climbing. All his grandmother wanted was for him to take care of the house, the town, his family.

He’d failed her in every possible way, and her house was a silent reminder of promises broken, lives ruined.

Big-city girl that she was, Alana locked the house every time she left, so he used his keys to let himself in. Duke followed gamely at his heels, sniffing around until he lost interest, and settled under the kitchen table. Lucas set the toolbox on the linoleum and studied the house. He spent a fair amount of his career going into people’s homes and looking around. Serving warrants, searching for contraband, it all came down to finding out someone else’s secrets. But this house didn’t have any secrets from him. He’d spent summers in the room at the end of the hall, eaten more meals in this kitchen than he had in the house he had shared with his ex-wife.

Including a simple meal shared with Alana before a rather complex round of sex.

He looked around. The little shelf his grandfather had built for his grandmother now held African violets and a couple of pictures of Alana with a blond woman he assumed was her globe-trotting sister. The drop-leaf table was pushed against the wall and wiped clean. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like roses clustered in the middle with a sugar bowl. Opened mail was tucked between the shakers and bowl, a square letter mailed in the kind of thick envelope his ex had insisted on for their wedding invitations.

He opened a compartment in his mind and shoved his curiosity in with everything else he felt, but the shift in the house intrigued him. Observing the differences between the house his grandmother kept and the one Alana kept was scientific. Data gathering. Not emotional.

Note, for example, the books stacked by his grandmother’s chair, like they were when she was alive.

He flipped on the kitchen light. The cabinet doors were the original beadboard but painted in a green that reminded him of hospitals and retro television shows. The handles were a darkened iron. The counters were forty years old, and despite his grandmother’s care, marred with scratches and burns that came from making three meals a day, seven days a week. The wallpaper was faded yellowish and decorated with green and orange flowering vines that repeated in the linoleum. Both of those had to go, too.

It wasn’t the decorations that made it feel like his grandmother’s house. It was the care Alana took of it. The wood gleamed, the windows shone, and the grout looked like she spent an hour each weekend scrubbing at it with a toothbrush and bleach. Maybe she did, despite working thirty hours a week in the library and who knew how many more for Freddie and her family.

He’d spent enough time fixing Alana’s sink lately to know that this wasn’t going to be an easy project. The sink didn’t have any shut-off valves attached; in order for her to have water in the bathroom he’d have to install those . . .

He was standing in the tiny room, notebook in hand, developing a plan when the back door opened. “Hello?”

“In here,” he called back.

The sound of bags hitting the kitchen table, then her heels against the hardwood as she walked down the hall. The scent of her, spring air, a layer of faintly floral perfume over a more fundamental soap and heated female skin, reached him before she did. Then she peered around the doorjamb.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” he said. “Duke didn’t give you any trouble.”

“No,” she said. “He lifted his head and looked at me, then laid it back down and grunted. When I come back in my next life, I want to be that dog.”

He felt the corners of his mouth lift, a totally unexpected response. “He worked hard for eight years as a police dog. He’s earned a rest.”

The humming noise she made in response slipped over his nerves like velvet. “I’d like to change before we head out.”

“Sure,” he said, forcing himself not to look up from his notebook.

“I need the bathroom to take my makeup off,” she said.

Startled, he turned sideways and slipped past her. Like the first time they brushed up against each other in this doorway, his chest brushed her breasts. Unlike the first time, he went from aware of her to desperately aroused in a split second.

She bit into her lower lip but firmly shut the door behind him. He went into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Thinking through the renovation would take his mind off a quickie before running into Brookings.