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She knew how that felt.
“I’m sorry,” Devina said.
He shrugged. “What are you going to do.”
The officer turned away, but she stopped him. “Is it true? That you’d rather be dead.”
He blinked like he had no idea what she was talking about. But that was a lie. His inner thoughts were bared before her, and she knew that underneath the daily duties he distracted himself with, he was yearning for a get-out-of-jail.
“Is it true,” she whispered.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “I miss her that much. Kids are grown and busy. She was the one who kept them around. I sit at home alone at night… what is there for me, you know? It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’m supposed to retire next month. We were going to travel. I was going to buy her an RV and we were going to… travel.”
The bleakness in him touched her in a way that seemed as shocking as her wasting any time at all on some human who was nothing in the grand scheme of things.
“And you believe she’s waiting for you,” Devina prompted.
As he glanced around, she looked at the silver shield that was on his chest. The name on it was “Massarini” and the number was 216.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she’s in heaven or maybe we’re all worm food. Either way, I’m good because I’m not feeling like this anymore, or else I’m with her. Better’n where I’m at.”
Funny, how sadness could age someone. Though his features did not change, the folds that ran from the sides of his nose to the edges of his mouth seemed to gouge farther into his face, and the wrinkles by his eyes and across his forehead likewise deepened. The color seemed to fade out as well, everything draining, draining, draining. Until he looked like he was eighty.
“You’ve been praying,” she told him. “You want out.”
“Yeah, I do. It’ll be a relief—goddamn, why am I talking to you like this? I don’t tell anybody this.” He laughed awkwardly, the forced smile not lasting. “I don’t talk to nobody.”
“Are you sure,” she said quietly. “That what you prayed for is what you want. There’s no going back.”
“Yeah.” His eyes returned to hers, and there was nothing in them. No emotion, not even sadness. “I am sure.”
Devina extended the handkerchief to him. “Here, take this back. You don’t want to lose it.”
As voices percolated down from the second floor where the ransacked gun department was being processed for prints, he reached forward—
Closing her hand around his own, Devina stared deeply into the man’s watery brown eyes and gave things a squeeze.
The officer gasped, his brows flaring, his shoulders jerking back. Then he retracted his arm and grabbed the front of his chest. Weaving on his feet, he stumbled a little, fell against a display of water bottles, lost his balance completely. As all kinds of Yeti bounced around him on the hard floor, he slumped into a crumble and fought for breath.
Devina held the handkerchief to her own heart for a moment. Then she bent down and tucked it into his clenched fist. “You’ll see Nancy. Give it about a minute.”
Turning away from him, she blinked her eyes and looked up so that no more tears fell. “Help,” she cried out calmly. “Help. Something’s wrong with him.”
As her voice echoed around, other law enforcement people came to the balcony above, and when they saw the cop sprawled on the floor with the traveler mugs, they started racing for the open staircase.
Leaving them to it, not that there was any resuscitating the widower from his widow-maker, Devina decided she didn’t need to see the break-in’s aftermath, not now that she’d witnessed the theft itself thanks to the old cop’s rock-solid memory of the security footage.
Out in the gray daylight, she squinted and took her phone from her ass pocket. Flashing it at the officers, she said, “Got it. Thank you.”
A couple of them pride-bustled in their unis, kicking their chins up like they had done shit. But at least good ol’ Jer did the duty and lifted the yellow stripe for her.
“Glad we could help,” he said, all Mr. Man.
“Nancy’s husband took care of me, not you.”
As she tilted under the tape, he looked at her ass like he could have motorboated her butt cheeks, if he’d wanted to—and just as she was about to make sure the bean burrito he’d had for breakfast carved a fire path out of his body and took half his colon with it… he gave her a little intel nugget that solved her now-what.
Or rather, his communicator did.
His little shoulder-mounted speaker went off with a squawk, and as he reached over to silence it, an update came in about another scene. One that was downtown in a rough neighborhood.
One that the CPD was dismissing as unconnected to this highly alarming and dangerous theft of shotguns and hunting clothes.
