Heather(4)

* * *



The drive to the station is twenty-five minutes from where she pulled Jenna over. Every few miles the moonstone glow of animal eyes catches in her headlights. Deer, mostly. Occasionally, a pair of eyes closer to the ground—something stealthy, a predator on the prowl. Raccoon. Fox. Nothing but blackness in the rearview. It’s so dark it looks like someone’s thrown a cloth over it.

“You feel it too,” Jenna says. “Nothing good coming from a night like this.”

Callie itches at her neck, knows that when she finally gets to take this stupid uniform off that the skin will be welted, angry underneath.

“It’s a good thing I got you off the road before you killed somebody. That’s the real evil out there. Careless people who think nothing of hurting someone else.” Callie’s voice is harder than she intended and Jenna flinches.

“How is she? Jane?” Jenna asks.

Callie chooses her words carefully. Wants them to hit like a dart. “They’re hoping she’ll be able to walk on her own again in a few months.”

Three months ago Callie’s best friend, Jane, had been out at dusk foraging for wildflowers when she was mowed down in the road. Looked up to see the car nearly upon her, no headlights, Jersey plates. Silver or white, Jane couldn’t remember when she came to, hazy with the aftereffects of anesthesia and the mind-rearranging drip of pain meds. Her face remade by bruises and swelling, a broken leg, metal plates and pins holding her left arm together. Nerve damage that might be permanent, causing migraines that make her whimper, shut her eyes to the slightest change in the light.

“Frank and Lorraine helping her?”

“As much as they can.”

“Always playing the martyr, that Frank.”

“What do you mean by that?” She’s never heard anyone speak ill of Frank. As the former chief of police his word meant everything when it came to recommending Callie for the job after his predecessor suffered a major heart attack. Cops and civilians alike revered him, and he had only gotten out of the game when he hit sixty-five, mandatory retirement. He still hangs around the station all the time, the guys pumping his hand and slapping him on the back like he’s the star quarterback striding into the homecoming dance. There’s a local park named after him near the lake, Frank Caputo Greenspace, complete with a shining new playground.

Jenna groans, drops her head to her chest. “Nothing,” she mumbles. “Don’t listen to me. Can’t trust a word out of my mouth.”



* * *



More darkness, thick and resinous as sap all around them. Jenna is quiet for long enough that Callie wonders if she’s fallen asleep. But then Jenna starts to sing. It takes Callie a moment to recognize the Nirvana song that had been playing when she pulled Jenna over—Jenna’s made it her own, something low and plaintive and pretty. Coulda been the next Lucinda Williams, Jenna used to gripe. If Lucinda Williams had wasted all her time falling off bar stools. Jenna sings until they pull up to the station—a small log cabin in a wash of fluorescent lights.

Callie cuts the engine and they sit in the quiet for a moment. It’s Jenna who speaks first.

“Come on, Calliope. Why don’t we finally get this over with?”

The word finally sounds odd, until it occurs to Callie that maybe Jenna has been chasing this fate, something she considered a forgone conclusion. Fucking up again, getting sentenced, paying her dues. Callie knows that feeling too. Willing the bad thing to just happen already, so you can get on to facing it.



* * *



At the station she asks Latour to book Jenna. He grumbles to Collins on his way to do her processing. “She’s back?” he mutters. “Like shit you can’t get off your shoe.”

“What was that?” Callie asks, swiveling hard on her way to her office.

“Nothing,” he says, holding her stare. The younger guys might not know that Jenna is her mother. For some reason Jenna gave Callie her father’s last name—before he split for the West Coast. As a kid she hated the division between them, the distance it created, like Jenna never wanted to claim her. But as the chief of police it’s useful. Maybe they can book Jenna, charge her, and no one will have to know anything about the whole unpleasant business.

“Clock out after you process her, please. No overtime.”

“You got it, Hauser.”

“It’s Chief!” Jenna calls, from down the hall. In the small station you can hear most conversations unless they’re conducted at a whisper, another thing that irks Callie—this feeling that she’s always being watched. “My only daughter is gonna end up a cop, at least get her title right, dickhead.”

Latour and Collins turn to Callie, Collins with his mouth agape and his eyes lit up with questions. Latour doing his best to hide the smirk tugging at the corners of his lips.

“Like I said. Book her and clock out,” Callie says, through clenched teeth.



* * *



She retreats to her office, reviews a stack of reports and duty logs, but feels restless. She can hear her mother singing again, low and a little bit more gravelly than when Callie was young. She must be driving Latour crazy. Despite herself the thought makes her smile a little bit.

She sighs, stacks her reports, powers down her computer. She’s been on for twelve hours. Time to call it a night.