Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

"What was the last word from the dep?" Hadley's voice was quiet.

"He's on a ventilator. He hasn't regained consciousness."

Hadley worried her lower lip. On another occasion, he would've thought it was hot. "Sometimes, that's good," she said. "You know. Like a healing sleep."

"Yeah."

They both watched the countryside unfold as they rolled up and down the Cossayuharie hills. Suddenly, she said, "You got anything to eat at your place, Flynn?"

"Uh… yeah. Frozen meals. Leftover pizza."

"Good. Give me directions." She looked over at him. His confusion must have been plain. "I just… I can't face my kids and my granddad yet. And I sure as hell don't want to hang out someplace where anybody can gawk at my uniform." She was right. The word had probably already gotten out. Whoever didn't know about the shooting already would get the news tomorrow, when the Post-Star hit the doorstep. "So let's go eat at your place." She glanced at him again. "You don't live with your parents, do you?"

He wheezed a laugh. "No."

He told her how to reach his duplex in Fort Henry. He had the top half of a Depression-era workingman's house, plain as crockery, but the street was quiet and shady and he had garage space for his Aztek.

"Nice." Hadley parked in front of his space and dropped her rig in her cruiser's lockbox. Upstairs, he showed her the kitchen and excused himself to secure his own gun. "Get changed," she said. "Believe me, if I could get out of this damn outfit, I would."

He locked up his.44 and traded his uniform for baggy shorts and a T-shirt. It felt weird, stripping with her right down the hall in the kitchen. By the time he got back, she'd turned on the oven, found his stash of Miller's amber ale, and unwrapped four packages of frozen stuffed potatoes. "You know," she said, "these aren't that hard to make from scratch. Takes six minutes to nuke a potato."

He held out a T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts. "You want to borrow these? I mean, they'll be big, but the shorts have a drawstring." She stared at the clothes. He felt his face heat up. It had seemed like a good idea in the bedroom.

"Yeah," she said, finally. "I do."

He showed her the bathroom. Got the potatoes in the oven. Tried very hard not to imagine her undressing. Opened a beer. At least he wasn't feeling so stone-cold miserable anymore. It was hard to be depressed and awkward at the same time.

He heard the toilet flush. She was laughing. Oh, shit . The bathroom door opened. "Flynn," she said, "you've got the rules of admissible evidence taped to the inside lid of your toilet seat." She laughed some more. "That's about the geekiest thing I've ever seen."

"It was from a long time ago," he protested. "I was studying. I forgot to take it down."

She picked up her beer. His T-shirt hung off her like a beach cover-up. "I bet you put a new topic there every week." She grinned at him. "Maybe I ought to try that with Hudson. He's been having trouble with his fractions." She wandered out the other end of the kitchen, where a table and four chairs divided his small living room from the enclosed porch. "Wow. You have a ton of books. Maybe I should just send Hudson over here. Let you tutor him."

"Sure," he said. "I like kids." He rolled open the glass door to the porch.

She rested her bottle on one of his bookcases. "That's because you are one."

He picked up her beer. "Come out to the porch. It's cooler."

She sat on the rattan couch that used to be his parents' and he stretched out in an Adirondack chair that had been his oldest brother's shop project. They propped their feet up on the rattan coffee table. The early evening breeze sighed through the screens. They sat in silence, drinking their beers. Hadley studied the beads of condensation rolling down the amber glass.

"I'm going to quit the force," she said.

He stared at her. "What?"

"It hit me, today." She looked at him. "What the chief told me. This isn't like working at an insurance office or a restaurant. This is like signing up for the army. People get killed."

No officer on the MKPD has died on the job since 1979."

"Thank you, Kevin," she singsonged. Her voice hardened. "That statistic's about to change."

He pushed himself out of his chair. He couldn't sit still and talk about this at the same time. "The chief will be fine."

"We don't know that! Even if he lives, he could be disabled, or have brain damage from his heart stopping so many times, or-"

"Don't. Please, don't." He crossed to one screened-in window, then another.

"I'm sorry." She got up herself, now, and blocked his pacing. "I'm sorry." She looked up at him. "It's different for you. To you, it's still like a kid's game of shoot-'em-up."

"No," he said. "It's not."

She dropped her eyes. "No," she said. "It's not. I'm sorry."

He took a step closer to her. "And for once and for all, I'm not a kid."

"No." She looked up at him again. "You're not."

Then-he had no idea how-she was in his arms and he was hoisting her up, crushing her against him, and they were devouring each other, kissing, biting, sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

"I don't want to be alone tonight," Hadley gasped. "I don't want to be alone."

"No. No."

She hugged her arms and legs around him so tightly she nearly cut off his circulation. "Take me into your bedroom. Now."

"Yes. Oh. Yeah." He staggered down the hallway, and then they were in his room, then they were throwing off their clothes, then they were in his bed, and-oh my God-she was hotter, softer, wetter, sweeter than anything he could have imagined. He almost lost it, trying to touch her everywhere at the same time, but she slowed him down, said, "Here" and "Like this," and, "Oh, yes, that's just right." Let her show you what she likes , he had read, so he did. He was good at following directions, damn good, maybe, because she shook and then she clutched at him and then she arched off his bed, her voice strangling in her throat, and he felt amazed and powerful and tender all at the same time. Then she drew him over her and wrapped her legs around him and he pushed and everything in the moment must have been written all over his face because she laughed low in his ear and whispered, "In like Flynn."

There was no place to kneel and pray in the Critical Care Unit. A funny oversight, Clare thought. They had every other type of lifesaving equipment stuffed into the windowless space. They only had one chair, which she and Margy and Janet had rotated between them until Janet had to go home to her kids and her cows and Margy fell asleep on a wide sofa in the CCU waiting room. Clare dragged the chair's footstool to the foot of Russ's high-tech bed and knelt there. A little idolatrous, perhaps, as if she were praying to the long, broken body lying still and pale beneath the blanket.

She knew she ought to pray for God's will, not her own. She knew that bad things were not tests or punishments. She knew God was not a celestial gumball machine, and there was no combination of words or rituals that could force God's awful hand.

But desperation stripped away her knowledge, leaving her praying like a small child. Please, God, please, please, don't let him die. I'll do anything. Please don't let him die .

She had stopped in at the church and gotten her traveling kit after returning Sister Lucia to the Rehabilitation Center. The old woman had framed Clare's face between her hands and said, "I will pray without ceasing. For him and for you."

Now, at three in the morning, she anointed Russ with oil. "I lay my hands upon you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," she said, "beseeching our Lord Jesus Christ to sustain you-" It was meant to be an outward and visible sign, but in her slippery fingers it was a talisman, a seal, a dare to God to take him now she had protected him. She would have drenched the room in holy water, hung crosses on his ventilator and saint's medals over his heart monitor if she had thought she could get away with it. Magic. Faith. Her will. God's will.