Мэри Дэвидсон - Canis Royal Bridefight

CANIS ROYAL: BRIDEFIGHT

MARYJANICE DAVIDSON 
MS Reader (LIT) ISBN # 1-84360-293-8 
Mobipocket (PRC) ISBN # 1-84360-294-6 
Other available formats (no ISBNs are assigned): 
Adobe (PDF), Rocketbook (RB), & HTML 
(c) Copyright MARYJANICE DAVIDSON, 2002. 


All Rights Reserved, Ellora’s Cave. 
Ellora’s Cave, Inc. USA 
Ellora’s Cave Ltd, UK 


This e-book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by email forwarding, copying, fax, or any 
other mode of communication without author permission. 


Edited by Martha Punches 
Cover Art by Darrell King 


Chapter 1

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I wish I were dead.

It was 1:08 a.m. on the morning of September 17, and Lois Commoner was thinking thoughts that for her, of late, were quite typical.

As she was lying on the alley floor, listening to the victim’s broken sobbing, she thought, Would I go to Hell? Not a chance. This is hell. There’s gotta be something else. And if there isn’t, what do I have to lose?

She banished such thoughts—now was not the time—and rolled over onto her stomach. She took a deep breath, put her palms flat on the filthy street, and pushed herself up until she was standing. This took six minutes and was just short of excruciating. Her knee was screaming. Her back had a kink in it. Her knuckles were bleeding. And she had a splitting headache. The headache bothered her more than anything else.

“I don’t suppose you have any Advil in your pockets ,” she asked the vic, who was crying and holding her purse strap. The purse itself was, of course, long gone. “Or even a Tylenol?” The victim had probably been a nice-looking woman when her evening began. Now the carefully coiffed blonde hair was in disarray, her mascara was running down her cheeks, her dress was torn, and her shoulder probably hurt almost as much as Lois’s knee. “How about just aspirin?”

The vic shook her head and kept crying. Lois’s headache worsened. She considered telling the vic to cut the shit, then decided against it. She herself was pretty jaded on this stuff, but that was no reason to be an unsympathetic jerk. At least not out loud.

Sirens wailed in the distance, which was a distinct relief. Blondie would be off her hands, and on some beat cop’s. Well, that’s what she— they —were paid for.

“What happened?” Blondie finally asked. She held up her purse strap and stared at it like a betrayed lover. “Why didn’t you stop him? Aren’t you a cop? You told that— that jerk who took my purse you were a cop.”

“Not anymore. I mean, I am, but I’m on desk duty now.” Boy, did that admission taste bad. She actually spat to clear her mouth, then continued. “I got hurt a while ago. I’m off the streets.” Her knee throbbed agreement, as if to say, Damn right, chickie, and what’d you take off after him for, anyway? You must’ve known you couldn’t have caught him. Couldn’t resist playing hero again, sap?

But it wasn’t that simple. She’d seen someone in trouble that was all. Heard the shriek and limped to the rescue. “Lois,” her dad said before he choked to death on that Dorito, “boy, was that a bad choice for a name. You’re nobody’s sidekick, and you sure as shit never need rescuing.”

That was then.

The black and white pulled up. She didn’t recognize either of the officers who got out and approached them. They were as alike as two peas in a pod: both tall, stocky, and blonde, with blue eyes—typical Minnesota stock. Lois, with her wild curly black hair and brown eyes, always felt like a gypsy among her Scandinavian co-workers.

They moved in unison toward Lois and the vic, cautiously but also with restrained urgency. “Fools rush in, ” her academy instructor had been fond of saying. “And so do dead cops.”

After carefully scanning the alley, one of the cops knelt beside Lois. “Good evening. I’m Officer Ristau, and this is my partner, Officer Carlson. Miss, do you need an ambulance? Either of you?”

“It’s Detective Miss,” she said, “and no. Just some Valium. Possibly some Percosets. But the vic would probably like an ambulance.” Or at least a shoulder to cry on.

“He took my purse,” Blondie said in a wounded voice. “My purse that my husband gave to me for Christmas. He took it. She tried to stop him and he took it anyway. My husband gave it to me.”

She’d go on in this vein, Lois knew, for some time. Civilians were always utterly shocked when something unpleasant happened to them. They thought if they paid their taxes and didn’t jaywalk and ate enough fiber, they were immune from mugging, rape, homicide.

She envied them that surety.

While giving her statement, Lois studied the cop’s sidearm and thought about death.

Chapter 2

How to do it? Pills? Jump off the IDS tower? Stick the barrel of her Beretta in her mouth and pull the trigger? Watch the Star Trek marathon until she was brain dead? Eat all the leftovers in her fridge?

The gun, Lois decided, was not an option. Bad enough she was seriously considering the coward’s way out; she wouldn’t pervert her weapon by making it the instrument of her death. How many bad guys had she pointed it at? How many vics had she defended with it? How many hours had she spent on the shooting range, honing her skill to better serve her city? No, the gun was definitely out.

Pills were tempting. She had some excellent ones for her knee. Twenty of those, chased with a daiquiri or six, would probably do the job nicely. Add the Trekkie marathon to that and death was a certainty.

She got up from the couch, limped to her bathroom, grabbed the bottles out of the medicine cabinet, limped back, and lined them up like soldiers on her coffee table.

She looked at them thoughtfully. There wasn’t much. She didn’t believe in crutches, even when she had to use them to get down her front steps. As for pharmaceutical crutches, she hardly ever indulged. “Ballsy,” her dad would have said. “Martyr,” her mom would have sighed, shaking her head.

Well, they were both dead now. Following the “Dorito Mishap”, her mother had mourned for eight months, then made two decisions: to visit her sister in St. Paul, and to fix her makeup at sixty-two miles an hour. The coroner hadn’t been able to decide if she’d died from the impact of crashing into the back of the semi, or from the eyeliner (Revlon’s Indigo Night) being driven into her right eye.

She didn’t miss her father much, if truth be told. He’d been too big, too gruff, too disappointed she wasn’t a boy and, toward the end, too drunk. Her mother, though…that was a different story. Lois had felt adrift ever since her mother’s death. When the one who bore you was gone, why bother with anything?

She shook off thoughts of her poor, doomed parents and returned her attention to the medication. There was a small bottle of Oxycontin, the drug of choice for addicts— she’d busted a few Oxycontin clinics in her day—a larger bottle of methadone, always popular with the chronic pain set, and a number of Duragesic patches.

She picked up one of the patches. How could she kill herself with these? Eat them? Stick a bunch around her heart?

And was she really, truly considering this? It sucked. It was the coward’s way out. It defined her, forever, as a loser. The cops who found her after the neighbors called to report the smell would roll their eyes at each other. The coroner would roughly bundle her into a body bag. Her neighbors would shake their heads and her captain would be irritated. Her fellow detectives would be shocked that ballsy Lois Commoner had done such a thing, and would pity her, and would forget her.