Hi, kids: Sorry it's taken so long. I've been blocked so badly that I was actually toying with the idea of plot ninjas. Here's what I came up with instead. Hope you like it.
Saturday 1:35 pm
Detective Dave Patterson stood leaning over the table in the interrogation room, his beefy hands planted on the surface and his clip-on tie dangling hypnotically before Tru's face. He reminded her of her junior high gym teacher – Overweight, badly dressed, bad teeth, bad comb-over. And like the gym teacher, this guy was all too ready to detain her for no reason.
"All right," he said. "Let's go over it one more time."
Tru grit her teeth and resisted the urge to call him 'Sipowitz'. He'd been pulling this one-more-time crap for an entire hour that nobody had to spare, especially her.
"I told you. I overheard some guy at a payphone this morning. I didn't catch all of it, but I heard the words 'two-thirty' and 'bank' and 'explosion'. Then I saw him walk into the bank with a suspicious package. I thought I should call somebody and report it."
A lame story to be sure, but the best she could come up with on short notice.
"Would this be the bank on First Street or Fifth?"
"First."
"And what did this package look like?"
"Like a bomb."
"How so?"
"Look," Tru said. "I've already told you everything I know four times. I'm not saying another word until I get some answers of my own."
Patterson shook his head sadly. "Ms. Davies, if I was you –"
"If I were YOU, I'd quit interrupting and find that bomb before it's too late!"
Patterson's eyes snapped with barely contained fury. "We checked that building, Davies. Top to bottom with metal detectors and dogs. You know what we found? Squat, that's what! Meanwhile, the bank across town got knocked over and the one cop available to respond to it got shot!"
Suddenly, what he was driving at sank in and Tru could hardly breathe.
"Wait a minute. You don't think that I –"
"Lou told us everything: How you was to distract the precinct with a phony bomb threat while him and his boys pulled the job, how you knew we wouldn't ask questions because nobody wants another nine-eleven on their hands. Real classy, taking advantage of America's greatest tragedy like that. But you screwed up. You got a cop shot. And I don't care if I lose my shield; I'm taking you down hard."
"Wait a minute! Who the hell is Lou?"
"HE'S THE GUY WHO PULLED THE BANK JOB, TRU!" Patterson exploded. "When we brought him in, he sang like a canary."
"I'm telling you, I don't know any Lou!"
"Oh yeah?" Patterson took something out of his breast pocket and flipped it onto the table in front of her. "Then where'd he get that?"
Tru stared. It was a close-up photo of her, laughing on a park bench.
"I... I don't know..."
"Really? Then I guess you've got no ideas about the contents of your trunk either."
Tru shook her head, too numb to speak.
"Yeah. We searched your trunk. We heard you was smart, but I didn't think you'd know how to make a C4 bomb."
"A WHAT?"
Patterson stood up straight, triumphant. "Still not giving up, huh? Let me tell you something, Davies: Lou's already cutting deals just by serving you up. It's up to you how much you want to give us, but he's already way ahead. And if that cop dies, you're going to need as many points as you can get as long as you're in this precinct. Now you think about that for a while, and then we'll go over it one more time."
Saturday 2:30 pm
An hour later Patterson sat at his desk, taking his time with finishing a meatball sub and going over the arrest reports. Davies could sit in the hole and stew all night for all he cared. Lou and Tru. What a pair. This was the easiest bust of his career. That Davies chick hadn't even lawyered-up yet. He just hoped Fielding lived to see the bastards go down.
The desk phone rang and Patterson used his shirt as a napkin for his fingers before answering.
"Patterson."
"Hello, Detective Patterson. This is Dr. Harper from County General. It seems you're listed as an emergency contact for an Officer Fielding?"
"Yeah! Are you his doctor? How's he doing? How'd the surgery go?"
A pause. A sigh. "I'm very sorry. Officer Fielding died in the operating room about twenty minutes ago."
Patterson opened and closed his mouth in silent shock for a full minute before he shot to his feet and, with a primal roar, hurled the phone across the room to smash against the wall.
"Get Lawrence in here NOW!"
Jack listened to the sudden dial tone and shook his head. God, cops were predictable.
Saturday 2:43 pm
Tru paced the small holding cell liked a caged tiger, her socks becoming filthy on the seldom-cleaned floor. They'd taken her shoes, her jacket, and everything in her pockets, and left her in this locked room to read the endless graffiti and contemplate everything that was wrong with this situation. Legally, they could hold her for 24 hours without a formal charge. That was about 22 hours too many, and they were dawdling about even setting bail. When she'd asked for a phone call, the arresting officer had yanked the cord out of the nearest office phone and tossed it to her, then told the unit secretary to make a note that Tru was waiving her right to a phone call. While part of her admired everyone's loyalty to their fallen comrade, she wished they'd place the energy of their anger into something more constructive than tormenting her. Like, say, finding out why someone she was sure she didn't know had decided to randomly set her up?
Fielding. Was she really responsible for what had happened to him? Did it happen because she'd ignored the warnings of her friends and her mother? Was this what she meant? Stop before you get hurt again? Stop before you get somebody ELSE hurt?
No. It couldn't be. She'd already stopped the bomb from going off, and she supposed a wounded cop was mildly better than a mass casualty incident. But how had she stopped it? The cops claimed there hadn't even been a bomb in the building. None of this had made sense from the beginning. Who robs a bank with a bomb? Who?
She jumped when the door opened. It was Lawrence, her hulking arresting officer. He threw her shoes at her without warning, and she barely caught them before they could hit her in the head.
"Get those on. You're being transferred."
"Transferred where?"
"Get them on now, or I'm dragging you through the snow barefoot."
Five minutes later, Tru was shivering in the back of an unmarked sedan. Lawrence drove stoically through the gathering snow storm, his partner silent beside him. Her request for heat having been ignored, Tru rubbed her arms in a sad attempt at friction heat and watched the scenery go by. They reached the edge of town, went past it, out onto the freeway, and onto a country road she didn't know... Transferred? Where the hell could they be transferring her to that was this far out of town?
"Where are we going?"
Again, they ignored her.
"I know you're not taking me to some other police station. Now what's going on?"
"Ooh, so now she wants to talk?" Lawrence said to his partner. "She ought to try telling us there's an anthrax letter in the postal system somewhere. That just might distract us long enough for her to escape, don't you think?"
"Look, there's a very real possibility that a bomb is still out there somewhere. The more time you waste with me –"
"You know what, Davies? I'm sick of that subject. Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about a police officer with nineteen years on the force, three weeks away from his sargent's exam, had a wife and three kids at home."
Had?
They hit a bump that almost clocked Tru's head against the roof. Looking out the window, she found the country road had become a gravel road through a wooded area. Secluded, she thought with a sinking feeling. Secluded, in an unmarked car with two plain-clothes cops who blamed her for the death of a comrade.
"Hey!" she said, banging on the plexiglass that separated the front and back seats. "Where are we going?"
"Let's just say... Justice moves too slow sometimes."
Tru looked frantically around for a way to escape. There were no handles or window controls on the doors. It looked like the only route to her freedom was through the front seat.
She sat back, drew her knees up to her chest, and kicked out with both feet. The shield buckled, but didn't break.
"Hey!" Lawrence roared. "What the hellya –"
Tru kicked again. The barrier cracked, and the car swerved on the slick road.
"Knock that shit off! You're going to friggin' kill us!"
"Then stop the car," Tru demanded.
"Hal, do something! I'm trying to drive here!"
"Like what?" Hal wailed.
Tru kicked. The barrier shattered. Lawrence shrieked as one of the splinters flew into his eye. Hal lunged for the wheel, but it was too late: The car was already careening off the road. It burst through a snow bank, smashed its right fender on a tree, and the next thing Tru knew, the ceiling traded places with the upholstery and she was being tossed about like a sock in a dryer. The sensation ended abruptly when the window rushed up to meet her head. She heard a crunch, and the lights went out.
Saturday 3:00 pm
Jack tugged the new wrinkles out of his three-piece suit before sauntering into the precinct house. It took all his will not to dance over the short distance. This was going to be the gloat of a lifetime.
Inside, he stood over the desk sergeant and cleared his throat for attention. Sergeant Sykes didn't even look up from his stapling.
"Yeah?"
"Jack Harper, attorney at law. I'm here to represent a young lady who was arrested this afternoon."
"Which one?"
"A Tru Davies, I believe. You're holding her on suspicion of accessory to armed robbery, among other things."
At the mention of the name, Sykes's thin face paled and he turned alarmed eyes up to Jack.
"Uh... I... I'm not... Let me just get the guy in charge of her case. Don't move!"
Sykes bounded across the room to Patterson's desk.
"Patterson!" he hissed.
"Sykes, what did I tell you about bugging me when 'All My Children' is on?"
"We got a problem. Davies' lawyer is here!"
Patterson inhaled a bit of the twix he was eating and coughed little bits of it across the room.
"What?"
"Davies' fucking lawyer! What are we going to tell him?"
"She doesn't have a lawyer. She waived her phone call and she never asked for..."
Sykes frowned when Patterson cut himself off, watching the older man's eyebrows draw together until he looked like Bert from Sesame Street.
"Patterson?"
"Frink," Patterson growled.
"Huh? You mean that little medic across the street? What about her?"
"She was there when Davies got picked up. She must've sent this guy over here."
"So what do we do? You already sent Hal and Lawrence out to –"
"I KNOW. Tell him she's being transferred across town."
"What about when he finds out she's not there?"
Patterson sighed. "Then... I'll figure something out. Meantime, I've got a little inter-department P.R. to do."
Saturday 3:03 pm
Tru came to with a gray light spreading across her vision and a pounding in her skull that almost drowned out the howling of the wind. Slowly, she recognized the light as daylight that shone through the starred window of a car. The cracks sparkled red with the drops of blood that clung to the glass.
Tru put a hand to her face and then examined her bloody fingers with the sort of detachment that only comes having one's bell rung but good. Somehow, she managed to hold onto the fact that waking up with blood on her face was a bad enough sign that she needed to change the situation and fast.
She sat up through a wall of pain and realized that she had been lying in broken glass. Specifically, she'd been lying in the remains of the car's opposite window and staring directly up at the sky. The car had stopped on its side after rolling over at leas twice.
Tru wouldn't remember later how she did it, but she somehow managed to stand and get the broken door above her head open. Rubbery arms shaking, she pulled herself up onto the car's upraised side and slithered out, only to fall into the snow a moment later. She lay there for a moment, waiting for her brain to stop exploding enough for her to see. The totaled car swam in front of her, its front end angled down into a stream that ran parallel to the road.
She pushed herself to hands and knees on the bank. More cops would be here soon. She had to get away before then. And speaking of cops, where were Lawrence and Hal? Shouldn't they be pouncing on her like cougars about now?
Up on numb legs, she lurched forward until she made it around to the half-submerged front of the car. The windshield was a crumpled membrane in the distorted frame. Through the intricate network of cracks, Tru could just make out the two inert men, one on top of the other, face-down in the water of the stream.
Without thinking past the fact that she had to hurry, she peeled the windshield back like the lid of a sardine can. With her feet braced in the ever-deepening snow, she grabbed Lawrence by the jacket and heaved him up onto the bank. When his back hit the ground, a spurt of water flew from his mouth and he began to breathe on his own.
Tru repeated the process with Hal. Her head pounded with the exertion and the curtains threatened to fall again. Tru blinked them away. She couldn't pass out. She had to go. She had to run.
She made it to her feet again and staggered off into the woods, into the falling snow, into the howling wind. She shivered. She walked.
Stop, Tru.
Stop? No, she couldn't. She had to keep going. It didn't matter that she was cold or tired or that her head was killing her. She had people to save.
The wind bit cruelly through her thin sweatshirt and jeans. The snow fell harder, so much like her dream.
Stop.
She couldn't. It didn't matter that her hands and feet were cramping or that the blood continued to seep from the cut above her eye. Keep going.
So cold.
Stop.
Yes... No! She had to keep going. It didn't matter that her legs were getting to be about as useful as dead oak trees or that she couldn't even keep her frozen eyes open anymore. Keep going. She had to, or something terrible would happen.
She didn't know how long or how far she'd gone when the wave of nausea knocked her off her feet. On hands and knees once more, her empty stomach heaved as the thick snow accumulated on her back. When she tried to rise again, her arms and legs gave out and she fell, sightless, strengthless. She wasn't shivering anymore. She wasn't even cold anymore. She felt nothing, saw nothing.
Stop, Tru.
Yes... Yes.
TBC...
I'll try to get the next update posted a little quicker next time. Until then, stay warm!