Deadfall by Deborah Coonts

Author:Deborah Coonts [Coonts, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-944831-08-0
Publisher: Chestnut Street Press

The heat and our breath had fogged the windows but didn’t touch the cold that had me shivering out of my skin. I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering. Carla stared at me, making me self-conscious—scrutiny wasn’t my thing. God knew I got a lot of it. Guess I should be used to it, but I wondered if that was even possible.

“You sure you’re okay?” Carla asked, delaying.

“Okay is a relative term. I’ll live. Just tired. Probably hungry. And my knee hurts like a mother.” Not to mention the broken heart thing, which I didn’t…mention. That whole bit of pain was jumbled up with all the other, graying out the memory of what caused it. Someone had told me that was our body’s way of allowing us to move forward: it forgot the pain of childbirth so you’d do it again. Maybe it forgot the hurt of a broken heart, so you’d risk another. “So, about Beck?”

She killed the engine, which killed the heat, then crossed her arms and pressed back against the driver’s door as if trying to put as much distance between her and the apparent bombshell she was sitting on that would explode between us.

I’d numbed myself—that’s the only way I knew how to deal at this point. Reality hadn’t exactly been my friend. And the future would sabotage each day if I let it…so I didn’t.

“We’d been out of the Academy maybe ten years.”

“So not that long ago?” Math was still a higher mental exercise that eluded me. Besides, I thought Beck was around forty, but we’d never discussed it. Hadn’t seemed to matter since I was rarely sure how old I was.

“Yeah, nine years, give or take. Beck was busy with his family—his girls were teenagers. His wife was one of those. Resented every hour he spent ‘solving other people’s problems’ as she said. He was handling it, but he wasn’t happy, and he was stretched to the max.”

“Hardwired to pissed off?” He’d let me see enough hints to feel the heat from the fire he’d walked through.

“Hair-trigger, man.” Carla shook her head. “I tried—hell, we all did—to get him to back off, take some time, get his family under control or get out. But it was like work was the only place he felt…”

“Himself.”

Her eyes flicked to mine. “Yeah.” She shifted back to looking out the window. She’d wiped a small round hole in the condensation.

I didn’t think she saw anything but looking kept her from focusing on what she was doing, what she felt was the betrayal of a good friend…a brother. I knew the cost and gave her struggle the appropriate reverence by keeping my trap shut.

“Anyway, his daughter started picking up the tension between her parents. Man, she was good. She knew exactly where to stick the knife in her dad and just how far to turn it. When he wasn’t home, which was often—as you know, a detective’s hours suck—she started acting out, disobeying curfews, all the stupid teenager stuff.

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