Michael Prescott - Last Breath

But it wasn’t enough to understand fear intellectually. Fear had to be confronted, attacked. A teaching post at a private school would be only an escape from what still terrified her. She needed to stop running. She needed to fight back.

On the day before she enrolled in the Academy, she and Adam were married by a judge in a small, simple ceremony. There was no honeymoon. They’d meant to take one later but had never gotten around to it.

The Academy training lasted seven months. After graduation she was a P-1-a patrol officer with probationary status partnered with a training officer, whose job was to help her forget everything she’d learned in class. She was assigned to Harbor Division, where she became familiar with the Vietnamese and Cambodian gangs that fought vicious battles over drugs and turf. To call Harbor a war zone was no exaggeration; the Vietnam War had never ended there.

She spent two years in Harbor, rising to P-2 rank, while Adam completed law school. She paid the bills for both of them. “I’m a kept man,” Adam would joke, but she knew it hurt his pride to take her money, just as it bothered him to know that his wife cruised the streets with a sidearm while he toted a backpack full of law books.

She worked a lot of night watches and graveyard shifts, and Adam was at school during the day and holed up in the law library most evenings. They saw too little of each other. When they were together, they seemed to have less and less to say.

C.J. blamed it on herself. Her job was exhausting and brutal, and it simultaneously wore her down and made her hard. Adam would talk about his day-classroom lectures, oral exams, mock trials. It felt like kid stuff to her after nine hours spent chasing the radio from one 911 call to the next, seeing the corpses of gang-war victims, comforting the bereaved, sneaking down alleys in response to a shots-fired report. It was real, it was electric, and Adam knew nothing about it. When she spoke of what she had seen and done, he didn’t know how to respond. After a while she knew he wasn’t listening anymore.

Then, just about a year ago, in the first week of February, she came home earlier than usual, punching out before the end of her watch because she had a fever and a queasy stomach. She entered the house-their house, this house, the little fixer-upper they’d bought with her salary-and walked into the bedroom, intending to lie down with a cold compress on her head.

And found Adam with a woman named Ashley, who was, as she later learned, one of his classmates.

The affair had been going on for months. Evidently Adam had found someone worth listening to, someone whose world was not so different from his own.

C.J. filed for divorce the next day. Adam fought it. He wanted them to stay together. He swore they could make the marriage work. He might even have believed it. She knew better. Yes, she could understand what he had done. At a certain intellectual distance she could even sympathize.

But she could never trust him again.

She resumed using her maiden name, a decision that seemed to upset him as much as the divorce itself. She kept the house, which she, after all, had paid for. Adam moved to a studio apartment in Venice and took a part-time job while finishing his studies.

She had kept in touch with him to some extent. She knew that Ashley had left him, that he’d plowed his energies into his schoolwork and had obtained his degree with honors.

Now it was January, the twelfth month since their breakup. She had redecorated the house and transferred to a new division, feeling obscurely that she had to make a fresh start. Adam had found work and moved to a two-bedroom condo in Brentwood.

New lives for them both.

Sure.

She knew that neither of them had gotten fully back on track since the divorce. That was why it was dangerous to get together. There was too great a temptation to revive the old relationship. It would be so easy. She had always loved him, even at the end. Loved him, hated him, distrusted him-all at the same time.

She sighed. “You’re a piece of work, Killer,” she murmured, “you know that?”

She went into the den and sat before her desktop computer, logging on to the Internet to check her e-mail. As usual, it was mostly spam. She wondered why they called it that. Perhaps because nobody liked it, but it never seemed to go away.

One message was different from the rest. It consisted of one sentence.

WELCOME TO THE 4-H CLUB.

She had heard of 4-H, of course. Some sort of club for people who raised livestock or something.

Whatever it was, she had never tried to join, and even if she had, this cryptic message was hardly the way to welcome a new member.

Must be a joke, she decided. Or maybe the rest of the message had been cut off.

She almost deleted the e-mail, but hesitated. The message disturbed her for some reason. She thought of the white van. Now this.

There couldn’t be any connection. Of course not.

Even so, she saved the message on her hard drive, though she wasn’t sure why.

She logged off and shut down her computer. Suddenly she was restless. Returning to her bedroom, she threw on some clothes, then dragged her collapsible home gym out from under the bed.

She set to work doing butterfly curls. Generally she did a minimum of fifty, with the resistance set at a moderate level. She had learned not to train too hard. A pulled muscle could hamper her activities in the field for days, even weeks. It was better to do more reps at a lower setting. Besides, she was mainly interested in toning her physique.

Finished with the curls, she readjusted her position and did leg lifts. It was more efficient to alternate upper and lower body exercises, allowing one set of muscles to recover while the other set was being worked.

She had never been a fitness maven until she enrolled in the Academy. Then she set to work on improving her physical conditioning even before the first day of class. Her greatest fear had been humiliation-she hadn’t wanted to be a washout, hadn’t wanted to find that she couldn’t complete a set of push-ups or a jog around the track, while all the other recruits handled it easily. As it turned out, she proved to be one of the fittest members of the class-a mixed blessing, since it meant that her instructors often singled her out to lead the class in an exercise routine.

Some cops gradually lost their conditioning once they were in the field. She was determined not to follow their example. In the Academy, slow reflexes or poor coordination could have cost her a few points with the instructors. On the street, the same failings could get her killed.

Suppose she had been a fraction slower when she grabbed Ramon Sanchez’s revolver…

“Don’t think about it,” she gasped, flexing her thigh muscles in another lift.

She was alive, she was healthy, she was safe. No need to think about might-haves and what-ifs.

No need to worry about anything at all.

Treat enjoyed working out with Caitlin.

He lay on his bedroom floor, his laptop computer resting a few feet away on the smooth carpet, the video feed clearly visible. She exercised her abs and shoulders and back, and he practiced bending.

Bending-that was what he’d called it ever since childhood, when he discovered the remarkable suppleness of his limbs. In medical argot he was hypermobile; in common parlance, double-jointed-the word double being used in its less familiar sense of fold or bend. Some of his flexibility had diminished with age, but through daily exercise he remained limber enough to hyperextend each elbow by more than fifteen degrees, to bend his knees forward to the same extent, to touch his forearm with his thumb, and to perform other such carnival tricks.