The Territory (Josie Gray Mysteries #1)(58)
He reached across the counter and clasped her hand. “You need a room tonight?”
She nodded.
“You stay in room six. Right next to my apartment. You need anything tonight, you knock on the wall and I’m at your door in two seconds.” He opened the key box on the counter and passed her a gold key on a smiley face key chain. “Anything else I can do?” he asked.
She paused, embarrassed, and looked down at her uniform. “I don’t want to go home tonight. I can’t face that house right now.”
“You need clothes? You go to your room and I’ll run to the store.”
She closed her eyes for a moment to fight back her humiliation. She finally sighed and looked at Manny. “I can’t go to the liquor store in uniform. Do you have any bourbon stocked away somewhere?”
He smiled at her warmly. “Sleep. That’s what you need.” He left her for a moment and returned from the back room with a fifth of bourbon, still sealed. “I get this question occasionally. On the house. The room, too, of course.”
*
Josie turned on the lamp on the bedside table and set the air-conditioning on high. The unit hummed to life and blew musty, damp air into the hot room. The paneled walls were painted a buttery yellow, and an ancient wedding ring–pattern quilt was on the bed. Hand-embroidered pillows were piled up against a wicker headboard, and a rocking chair with a lace-covered cushion sat in the corner facing a TV. It was a cozy room that reminded her of country farmhouses back in Indiana. Josie used Manny’s complimentary toothbrush and ate the cheese crackers she had brought with her from her stash at the department. She laid her uniform out across the rocker and propped herself against the pillows in bed in her underwear. She put the remote control beside her and cracked the seal on the bourbon, filling the drinking glass on the bedside table half-full. She stared into the amber liquid in the glass as if some measure of clarity might bubble up into her thoughts after the burn dissipated.
Josie wondered what her mother had done, propped up in a bed just like hers—if she had drunk her own glass of bourbon or taken pills to fall asleep. Josie had tried desperately to keep her mother’s real intentions behind the mental wall she constructed, and she thought she had succeeded. She wondered now if she had been too harsh, if she should have given her mother a chance to explain things. But what good was an explanation in the end? She had been a lousy mother. The question Josie was wrestling with now was, did that give her a free pass to be a lousy daughter? And what about a girlfriend? Did her job give her a free pass to shut out a man who obviously loved her?
Josie drank, eventually straight from the bottle, until the room tilted. She closed her eyes and imagined a chalkboard with a list of solutions. She felt sure there were answers inside her and wondered: Did she want to be a good cop, a good person, a good daughter, a good wife? It was obvious she couldn’t be all those to everyone, so she had to choose. She slipped down the pillows, set the bottle on the table, and fell asleep with the lights on. She dreamt about monsoons filling up the desert, the water closing in around her neck.
TWELVE
Josie sat in her squad car with the air-conditioning blowing on her face and stared at her front door for a long time. It wasn’t fear so much as dread. The smell of smoke and gunpowder and the image of the guns pointed at Dillon’s chest, at her face, would stay with her for many years to come. The spray of debris, the shattered glass, splintered pieces of wood trim and pockmarked walls awaited her. The sick knowledge that these men had come into her life with their guns and ruined her chance at a normal, loving relationship made her breathless and light-headed. Blood rushed to her head, and she gripped her steering wheel and let herself cry, the silent tears eventually giving way to sobs for the pathetic excuse of a life she was leading.
Eventually, cried out, she entered her house and found Chester asleep on the kitchen floor beside his dog dish. She had called Dell the night before and arranged for the dog to stay at Dell’s house. Dell called her cell phone that morning and said Chester had whined all night until Dell brought him home that morning. She knelt beside Chester and buried her face in his neck and talked to him, grateful for his big, brown, nonjudgmental eyes. He’d been through hell, too, and she felt lousy for leaving him the night before. One more living being to let down, she thought.
She gave Chester a hot dog out of the refrigerator and fresh water, and then let him out to run. She gathered broom and dustpan and the large plastic garbage can from outside. As she walked down the hallway, she heard a car pull into the driveway and felt her pulse race. She dropped the broom and pulled the gun out of her ankle holster, then looked through the crack in the living room curtain to find Otto and his wife, Delores, getting out of their car and walking up the front path.
Otto and Delores were both dressed in jeans and T-shirts. Even when Otto was out of his uniform, Josie rarely saw the sixty-year-old in anything but dress pants and button-down shirt or Delores in anything but print dresses. Otto carried a large duffel bag and a home-baked pie. When Josie opened the door, Delores came at her, smiling, with both arms extended. She pulled Josie against her soft body and spoke quietly into her ear about how good it was to see her safe and how she had a bed ready with fresh sheets for her.
“We’ll get your place cleaned up like new, and you can pack a bag and move in tonight. No excuses or fussing. This is the way it’s going to be,” Delores said.