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Before she could tell him not to put himself through this, or feel additional anger at Brick for making him do so, Rufus anticipated her.
“Let me just get it out. We responded to a domestic call. Two men, married. One ran a catering business, the other worked construction. The catering guy, it was obvious he was scared of his husband, but he told us he was okay. Said his husband had just had a bad day. Doesn’t matter if the victim is man or woman, it’s the same bullshit they always say.” Rufus’s lip curled. “He wrapped up some cookies he’d been baking, gave them to Bobbi, told us thanks for coming.”
He took a sip of his coffee, rotated the cup again. “A couple hours later, he was dead. Soon after we left, his husband took him to a place out in the sticks, tied him up, splashed gas on him, set him on fire and watched him burn to death. Drank a twelve pack of beer while he watched. He recorded the whole thing on his phone. It wasn’t a quick death. Not even close.”
Les closed her eyes. Rufus took a breath. “We had back-to-back calls right after stopping at their place. We didn’t get lunch, so after the second call, Bobbi opened up the cookies. The catering guy had put a note under them. ‘Help me. He has the house wired to blow up.’”
Les’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Now, you can say he was protecting himself best he could, but truth is, that kid saved both of our lives. I have no doubt if we’d tried to get him out of the house on that domestic call, this motherfucker would have blown us all up to prove a point. The bomb squad told us the blast zone could have killed or severely injured anyone within a fifty-foot radius around the house.”
“Oh, Rufus. That poor man.”
“Yeah. Every year at Easter I leave flowers on his grave. And Bobbi’s.”
She swallowed. “What happened to her?”
A flat look took over his expression. “At first, Bobbi seemed like she was handling it okay. Just another shitty call. We have them, it’s part of the job. Maybe that’s why I missed some of the signs. We all did, but fuck. She couldn’t wrap her mind around that happening on our watch. Or that she’d been the one he handed the cookies to. It festered. A month or so later, she went out to the spot where the kid died, drank a six pack of beer—same brand as that asshole who killed him—and shot herself.”
God, no.
Rufus held onto the flat look as firmly as the mug. She’d seen plenty of doctors and nurses do the same. Pull it in, compartmentalize it, put it away. Like them, he’d been trained to deal with a lot of potentially life-threatening variables in a split second. But figuring out how to deal with the consequences of those choices was outside the scope of any training, no matter what anyone said.
She was learning that hard lesson herself. Which now told her why she was here.
“I still have nightmares about that man’s death,” Rufus said. “He was about your age, and his eyes. Christ, they were this clear blue color. In my nightmares, I remember every emotion I saw in them that day. Fear, pain, sadness. A loss of hope, warring with the chance, the barest chance, that we could get him out of this mess. But at the center of it all was heartbreak, right? Because he’d loved the guy enough to marry him, hoped for a forever life with him.”
Rufus blew out a breath. “It weighed on both me and Bobbi, but we took different paths dealing with it. I used it to help me go forward, watch for clues in future calls I might otherwise miss. I’ve done the same with her death.”
“Rufus,” she said, her heart breaking. “Brick shouldn’t have asked this of you.”
He gave her an unexpectedly fierce look. “In all the years we’ve been together, he’s never asked me to talk about it, though he sure as hell sat here plenty of nights, watching over me after I drank myself into a stupor over it. Brick would give me every bit of his soul if I needed it.”
His dark eyes met hers. “It’s the hardest thing you can ever do, moving forward after something like that. You feel like you should be punished for it, do time, make penance in some giant way that will never be enough.”
She stared at him. Telling this story was costing Rufus, but Brick knew what it had cost Bobbi. And now Rufus’s words hit her, a sharp ache under her ribs. You have his heart.
Rufus’s sober expression reflected her thoughts. “He brought you to someone who could give you insight into what you’re going through. Because he’s that damn worried about you.”
“How did you get through it?” she asked quietly.
Rufus’s expression eased, and he almost managed a smile. He set aside the coffee cup to take both her hands in his. “I learned there’s a really fucking important line between expecting yourself to be God, and living up to the expectations of one. That line is all ego on one side, humility and commitment to service on the other.”
He tapped the badge on his shirt. “I get up every day and resolve to do my best. At the end of my shift, I hope I did more good than harm, even knowing I have no guarantee of that. If I fuck it all up today, tomorrow I have to get up with the same resolve.”
He glanced at the tattoo above his wrist. “I won’t lie, Les. For a while, everything you deal with about it is going to be a kick in the head. It’s a constant beat down. When you haven’t committed a crime, but you’ve done something you feel is unforgivable, you set yourself up as the judge, jury and executioner. You see everyone else who weighs in on it the same way. But it’s not the Monday morning quarterbacks who keep you up at night. It’s the one who’s not coming back. And the family left behind.”
Mrs. DaCosta rose in her mind. With a spurt of panic, Les banished the scene it called forth before the reel could start. She couldn’t handle that here, not in front of someone. Not even Brick.
Nose had raised his head and maneuvered a bony rear leg up to scratch one long ear. The flapping noise, his expression of bliss, would have made her smile in other circumstances. “It’s tearing me up inside,” she said. “It invades my sleep, makes me imagine I’m back at that moment. Instead of doing it wrong, I do it right. Fix it. Then I wake up.”
“Yeah. Those dreams are the fucking worst.”
“Does Brick get them…about the ones he couldn’t rescue?”
“Yeah. He does. I know it’s cold comfort right now, but if being a doctor is what you want and need to be doing, you just have to have faith and stick with it.” He nudged her. “Don’t be too mad at him. He’s a pretty decent guy.”
“He’s also a bit of an overbearing jerk.”
