Catherine Coulter - Backfire

“I was shot three years ago in an aborted bank robbery.”

“Where?”

“At the Bank of America on Chestnut.”

She threw a Frito at him. “No, on your body? Where were you shot?”

He gave her a faint smile, stood up, and pulled out his shirt. She looked at a four-inch scar on his left side over his lower ribs. It had to really hurt, she thought. She’d never been shot, only punched a couple of times. She kept looking at him, couldn’t seem to drag her eyes away from that hard disciplined body.

He said as he quickly tucked his shirt back in and sat back down, “She freaked, and couldn’t get past it no matter what I said. Our three-year marriage went downhill fast when I refused to resign from the Bureau. Bottom line, it was her ultimatum.”

He picked the Frito she’d thrown at him off his sleeve. Then he looked at it in his hand and carefully laid it down on the tray. “I’d always heard it’s nearly impossible for cops to stay married-but I’d never thought about it, since my parents have been married forever. I mean, we were both good people, weren’t we? I was in love, and so was she. Before I asked her to marry me we talked about the high divorce rate among cops. I gave her all the stats, quoted a couple of articles. She scoffed at the idea that she-who had just passed the bar-could possibly be swayed by any of that. I told her my hours could be crazy and she said her hours wouldn’t always be her own, either, but she was nothing if not levelheaded, she’d have no problem dealing with the chance of violence bumping into our lives.

“To be honest, the entire time we dated, it was more or less nine-to-five for me. I went out of town only a couple of times to do some undercover, but it didn’t impinge much on our time together. But the threat, the reality of violence, it was always there, always lurking, and I knew it. I simply ignored it.

“I’ll tell you, Eve, it sucks to be a cliché.”

She wouldn’t want to be a cliché, either. He was right, what had happened to them was all too common, and maybe why she hadn’t ever set herself up in the marriage market again. “You want a beer now?”

“Sure.” He got up with her to go to the kitchen. “Sorry to unload my sorry history on you. I didn’t mean to. Actually, I have no idea why it popped out.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“How old are you?”

“I’ll turn twenty-nine on the twenty-sixth of January.”

“You ever get close to getting married?”

“Yeah, I was married, right out of college. It wasn’t long before I realized I wasn’t going to be the last notch on the moron’s belt. Truth is, after the moron, I don’t think any guy could make it past my dad and my brothers. They’d make hash of him.” She rolled her eyes. “They told me after my little misadventure-that’s what my brothers called my brief marriage-if any guy did me wrong again they’d bury him deep, never to be found.”

She got a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, handed him one. They clicked bottles and drank.

Eve said, “You ready to kiss my owie now and make it well?”

“Yes,” he said, putting his beer on the counter, “I think I am.”

Judge Sherlock’s home

Pacific Heights

Early Thursday morning

Thanksgiving Day

Sherlock opened her eyes to see Dillon standing over her.

A big smile bloomed because, quite simply, how could it not? Sherlock yawned and stretched. “What time is it?”

“A bit after six a.m. How are you feeling?”

Sherlock queried her head. The wound itself throbbed a bit, but there weren’t any voices inside her head screaming punk rock, and that was good.

“Like a million bucks. You tell a great bedtime story, Dillon. Every bone in my body is humming ‘Ring My Bell . ’ What in heaven’s name are you doing up? Helping my parents with the turkey?”

“No, Molly is keeping the turkey to herself. Your mom’s in the kitchen, though, making sausage stuffing for you carnivores and a nice cornbread stuffing for me. I woke up a couple of hours ago, realized we’d all overlooked something, and went to work on MAX.”

She studied his face. “You know who he is? The man who shot me yesterday? The man who tried to kill Ramsey twice?”

He climbed into bed beside her, pulled her against him, and kissed her hair. “It’s all pretty straightforward once you look at it the right way.”

He was big and warm, his heartbeat steady against her chest. “What do you mean, ‘the right way’?”

“Remember, it was you, Sherlock, who suggested a long prison stay fit the bill, someone who’d had time on his hands to plan the bizarre attacks on Ramsey. And we knew the person who had that note delivered to me at the Hoover Building had joked to Ted Moody about calling him the Hammer-prison slang.”

She nodded.

“And Dane and Ruth have been checking inmates released since the first of this year, looking to find a father or a brother, someone with a relationship to one of our cases who was out now, who could be looking for revenge.”

Sherlock said, “Ruth told me she and Dane were going nuts, that they couldn’t find a prisoner who fit the profile.”

Savich said, “There’s a very good reason for that. I realized the one case that remotely connected Ramsey to me was more than five years ago, though I wasn’t all that involved. Remember Father Sonny Dickerson, the pedophile who kidnapped Emma?”

Sherlock clearly remembered the obsessed ex-priest who’d sexually abused Emma until she’d escaped and Ramsey had found her and hooked up with Molly to save her. So much violence, so much deception, and it had all ended in Dickerson’s murder in the hospital. And now Dillon knew. Sherlock snuggled closer, waiting. She enjoyed a good punch line as much as he did.

“I did a search on all of Father Sonny’s relatives. His father’s dead, his only other sibling, a brother, is dead. There was only one relative left who wasn’t dead, and that’s Sonny’s mother, in jail for killing her husband. She’s the Hammer.”

That was a kicker. “You’re kidding me-Sonny Dickerson’s mom shot me in the head?”

“Yes. We all believed it was a man, of course, since everyone who saw her-from Ted Moody, who brought us that note in the Hoover Building, to the lady who rented her the Zodiac-described a man. We even heard what we all thought was a man’s voice on that telephone message to Molly, never doubted it was Xu.

“She’s got a gravelly voice she’s learned to control, and she knows how to disguise herself as a man. She let us believe all the attempts on Ramsey’s life were Xu until Tuesday, when she shot you with Xu on the ground under you.” Sherlock came up on her elbow. “I just can’t get over it-Father Sonny Dickerson’s mother. But, Dillon, why didn’t her name pop right out when Ruth and Dane did their search, no matter if she’s female?”

“Because her name is Charlene Cartwright. Like I said, she was in jail for ten years for the murder of her husband, evidently a miserable human being who not only abused Sonny and his now-deceased brother but also his wife, Charlene. She snapped and shot a dozen bullets in his face with his own gun.

“From the court transcript I read of her trial in Baton Rouge, I think her shooting him was justified. I don’t know why her lawyer didn’t plead self-defense, but he didn’t. He went for the SODDI defense-Some Other Dude Did It-but the jury didn’t buy it, and no wonder, since there was so much evidence against her. They wanted her to serve hard time, and so she did. She was given fifteen years, paroled after ten.