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“Madden got elected by saying she was going to make changes.”
“Yeah, I don’t think these are the kind of changes people expected.”
“How’d Yen get involved?”
“She and her partner were Fox’s escorts to Barton Plaza. She lent him her handcuffs.”
“She got suspended for lending handcuffs?”
“Letter of reprimand. The suspension was a rumor. Not sure where it started.”
“Still...”
“I know, crazy, huh? You’re going to come back to an upside-down world, Danni. What’s good is bad and what’s bad is good. I still got ten years to go and I’m thinking it’s time to make like a banana and split.”
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The conversation rumbled around in her brain as she got dressed for a bike ride. From what Matt said, Gabe was simply doing his job, yet he was punished. The bad guy was rewarded. The system her dad had trusted in was failing on so many levels. What good would it do for Danni to return? Everything was stacked against her. Everything was stacked against the police. She needed a good hard workout to clear her thoughts and figure things out.
After leaving a note for her mother, she pedaled slowly out of the resort area, dodging lost tourists and a goat or two. Wild goats were everywhere on this island, and they usually made Danni smile, especially the little ones. Today she was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to pay much attention, though.
Once she rode up and out of the resort to the highway, Danni turned north toward Hawi and pedaled fast, raw emotions and anxiety fueling her muscles. It was twenty-seven miles to the quaint little town against a vicious headwind, but Danni was determined. Her mind churned faster than her pedals.
Trying to veer her thoughts away from Gabe, she concentrated on Yen. Yen was a tough woman. She’d overcome a lot to become a police officer because of her size. At five-four and one hundred pounds, she looked like a stiff breeze could blow her over. Her family was against her becoming a cop; her fiancée left her when she was accepted to the academy. Yen persisted because she wanted to give back to the community. A friend of hers had been shot and killed in a drive-by shooting when he was mistaken for a gang member, and Yen often said by becoming a cop and being proactive, she might save other people from pain and tragedy. Her goal was gang detail and she had almost made it when the riots hit. Now everything was on hold.
Yen was a good cop. Gabe was a good investigator. What could they have possibly done to be in trouble? And Jess... there was no more squared-away guy than Jess.
Danni groaned and pedaled harder, wishing her father was there for her to consult. She tried to imagine what he would say or where he would go for guidance. She wasn’t halfway to Hawi when it hit her hard, almost as hard as if she’d pedaled over an unexpected speed bump and sailed off her bike.
Dad would never tell her to quit. She remembered something he’d said to her when she was frustrated with her math homework.
“Quitters never get anywhere, Danni—don’t forget it. Stick with a problem until you solve it.”
Danni slowed but kept going. A lot of the fire had gone out of her. When she reached the road for Spencer Beach Park, she turned in.
The place was busy, but she found a quiet spot to stop. She got off her bike, removed her helmet, and wiped sweat from her brow. She looked out over the ocean, so blue and gorgeous. Lots of whitecaps on this windy day, something her mother liked to call sheep.
Danni sighed, tired not so much from her ride but from all the chaos in her head. When she was ignorant of what was happening in LaRosa, she felt peace. But it had been a false peace. Knowing the reality left her unbalanced, out of step with the world around her, and out of control. She wanted peace back, but there was no putting the genie back in the bottle.
So I quit,she thought, stay here, get my Realtor license. Could I forget all the trouble in LaRosa? My friends and colleagues? Moving two thousand miles away wouldn’t change what was happening in LaRosa, that her friends were still dealing with issues she no longer wanted to face. Being a cop was being a peacemaker, and Danni relished that part of the job. But making peace took two sides to decide on a truce. Right now, the other side showed no indication peace was even in their vocabulary.
Was staying hiding from reality or simply making a better life choice?
Hiding from reality.Her mother accused her of hiding, something Danni thought her mother had done when she moved. She’d asked her former partner such a question when she’d ranted about the move.
“How can she run away and hide?”
“Everyone deals with grief in their own way,”Dylan had said.
“But I’m still here,”Danni said, fighting her own tears.
“I doubt it’s about you, partner, so don’t make it so.”Dylan had been sympathetic, letting her vent, but then three months later he’d done the same thing and left her for retirement.
I did make it about me,Danni thought.
Was grief why she’d come here? How Mom justified moving away? Danni wondered.
The memory of the loss and pain of those two defections rolled over her like a tsunami, stirring up a sandy grit of poisonous emotion. Bitterness, despair, and grief. Danni winced as she remembered how her mother’s move brought back the devastating feeling of loss that had gripped her when her dad died. Danni had shelved those feelings and never confronted her mother. How did I deal with it? Danni asked herself.
