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CHAPTER4
Danni sipped coffee and opened her Zoom app. She preferred Zoom to FaceTime and preferred avoidance to both. But she was a realist. She couldn’t avoid a conversation with her mother forever. She made the connection. When her mother appeared on the computer screen, she looked tan. This was their first face-to-face call in a long while. Though Danni had waited as long as she’d thought was reasonable, she was glad she’d called. It was good to see Mom.
“I’m always here for you, Dannielle—something you well know. And you’re always welcome here.” Even though you took a week to call me back was underlying in her tone.
Danni looked away. Gomez had asked what was going on between Danni and her mother. Danni hadn’t answered because she didn’t know. Their relationship had been strained since her father passed and more so after Nicole sold her home in LaRosa. Danni didn’t want the tension; she just didn’t know how to make things right or why her mother’s move had so rubbed her the wrong way.
“Tempting,” she said as she turned back to the screen. An escape to an island, a place where she would not have to deal with the crime—if there was crime—was certainly enticing.
“I keep asking you to come, and I will continue to do so. I call my spare room Dannielle’s room. I’m certain you’ll love it here.”
Danni chuckled. Her mother had left nearly three years ago, and she hadn’t been back to LaRosa. Danni hadn’t visited either. Maybe it was time to forget the past and move forward.
“Come for a week. Sunshine and seawater are very restorative.”
“Was that why you moved there?” Danni asked, stopping short of saying her mother had those things in LaRosa and realizing as she asked the question that she hadn’t forgiven her mother for moving so far away so quickly after her father died. So much for forgetting the past.
“This isn’t about me, Dannielle, is it?” Nicole sat back, away from the screen. Danni knew by her expression she’d touched a nerve. Nicole Grace often spoke more with facial expressions than words.
This was a fight Danni had no energy for at the moment. “No, I guess not. I have a meeting today with Go-Go about my injury status. I’ll let you know what I decide after we talk.”
“Please do. And tell Rafael I said hello.”
“I will.”
“Are you going to get the scar fixed?” Danni’s mother tapped her forehead.
Self-consciously, on the other side of the call, Danni touched the scar she knew her mother was referring to. “I just got the stitches out yesterday. It might calm down on its own.”
“With lots of vitaminE. Which I know you’ll never have the patience to apply as often as needed.” Her mother gave Danni a look she was famous for, the down-the-nose, guilting-eyebrow arch.
“I’ll try to be diligent, Mom.”
“Humph, you’re so like your father, Dannielle. Remember, Ilove you. Your room is ready if you chose to come home.”
Danni swallowed. Why did you have to bring up Dad? Instead, she said, “I’ll call you after I talk to Gomez.”
She closed the screen, unsettled after the call. Danni had been born and raised in LaRosa, yet her mom called the place she now lived home. Why did her emotions concerning her mother bounce up and down like a yo-yo?
Home was Mom and Dad, here in LaRosa, not on a rock in the Pacific.The thought ran through Danni’s mind with the speed of a bullet train.
Despite the tension with her mother, at the moment, to Danni, a beach, warm salt water, and no responsibilities sounded pretty good. Much better than heading back to work to be spit at, called names, and assaulted. As appalling as it was to be off injured on duty, or IOD, she couldn’t say she was sorry to bemissing out on all the horrendous action going on in LaRosa.
“It’s really a free-for-all,”Matt Shaver, her partner, told her. “We are prohibited from using any force; we just have to retreat. The oldadage ‘Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile’ applies here. The rioters are taking and taking, and we can’t stop them.”
“You’re being sent out simply to take abuse?”
“Yep,”Matt said. “We’re the city’s crash test dummies. Certainly tells you morale is in the toilet.”
Grant Foster, one of her dad’s contemporaries, was vocal in his displeasure about the policy. Danni had read one of his quotes in the LaRosa Post, a twice-weekly online publication that often countered what was in the Tribune.
“We need to meet force with greater force if you want this nonsense to stop. It’s not about a shooting anymore; it’s about letting a bunch of spoiled brats run the city.”
The statement was met with outrage by a lot of people, including several posts in the comment section suggesting Foster be fired. The mayor, Elise White, indicated on social media that she didn’t like what “meeting force with greater force” looked like. She also said, when speaking of the rioters—protesters in her words—she “understood their disappointment with organized authority.” Danni hadn’t a clue what she meant. No one seemed to remember what started the outrage—a false narrative. At least no one in LaRosa.
It had surprised Danni when longtime Mayor Casey lost the election. He was a great mayor who supported the police unequivocally. He never made excuses for misconduct, but he did stand up for officers when the Tribune was unfair.
Chief Bill Estes had been promoted from the ranks when her father was still alive, and he was a good man in Danni’s opinion. But he was beholden to the mayor and the city council. His hands were tied.
