Troubleshooter

Chapter 6

Dray was stretched out on the couch when Tim finally got home, her special-order sheriff's-deputy pants unbuttoned around the eight-months heft in her belly. She looked up when he came in through the kitchen, and her cheeks were wet. He dumped his files on the table and stepped over the couch back, sitting high so he could cradle her.

"Goddamnit, I liked Frankie. How's Janice holding up?"

"Jim said not good."

"These are the risks we take." She was trying to firm up her face, play it tough as she'd learned from four older brothers and eight years as the sole female sheriff's deputy at the Moorpark Station, but her lips kept trembling, and her voice, when she spoke again, came out hoarse. "I want to blame him. I want to know Frankie made a mistake. That he did the wrong thing. That it's not that easy for our chips to get cashed in. I keep picturing Janice getting that phone call…"

She rested her head on his thigh, and he stroked her hair for a few minutes. Melissa Yueh, KCOM's ever-animated star anchor, proceeded with muted vigor, images and rolling tickers providing largely inaccurate tidbits about the prison break. As usual, Tim and Dray had spoken a few times throughout the day, so she knew the real version.

Dray thumbed down her zipper with a groan and slid a hand over the bulge, Al Bundy style. Her muscular frame accommodated the baby well. She carried the weight mostly in her midsection, though in the past month her toned arms and legs had swollen and softened, which Tim remembered from the last go-around and adored. Dray hated it.

"You ate?" he asked.

"In excess. You?"

"Not since breakfast."

He noticed her scowling and followed her gaze to the TV. Dana Lake, a component of that bizarre Los Angeles order of substars-the celebrity attorneys-sat in a swivel chair, fielding questions from Yueh about her two escaped clients. Dana was in the press constantly, representing everyone from the Westwood Rapist to an al-Jihad shoe bomber taken down at LAX. With her porcelain skin, precise features, and rich chestnut hair, she was stunning. She should have been beautiful, too, but she lost something in the summing of her parts. Despite her overwhelmingly apparent femininity, something about her was off-putting. Too hard a jawline, perhaps, or too severe a set to her mouth. Her face was like a beautiful mask, hardened from shaping itself pleasingly against its will. She rested her forearms on the news desk, squaring her shoulders and showing off the lines of her impeccably tailored suit.

"I hate this broad," Dray said. "She's been making the rounds all night. Larry King introduced her as 'the flashy female lawyer who never wears the same suit twice.' As if that's something admirable. Besides, what does she do with the suits when she's done? Is there some exchange program for anorexics?"

"She donates them to the needy."

Dray snickered, still wiping her cheeks. "Yeah. I'm sure the homeless are using her DKNY silk to stave off the holiday chill." She glanced at the field files piled up on the kitchen table, then thumbed Tim's Marshals star dangling from the leather tag at his belt. "Of course, now they want you back on the Warrant Squad."

"I'm the Troubleshooter."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot." She shoved her short blond hair up off her flushed face and fanned her olive deputy shirt. "I'm hot all day. I sweat like a pig in the vest. I feel like I'm melting. Except when I'm cold. Then I'm freezing."

"Maybe you should start your leave now."

"And miss all the fun of rousting biker assholes? Me and Mac pulled over three today. Yeah, wipe that surprised expression off your face. While we can't all stroll into the lion's den like a certain big shot, we're doing our part, even out here in bumfuck Moorpark. Captain said the database is coming along nicely?"

"That it is." He slid down next to her. She raised her boot, and he tugged it off and rubbed her foot. She groaned with delight, arched her back like a cat. "My visit with Uncle Pete actually gave me some good ideas," he said. "I decided I want you to start wearing a property jacket. And I want a tattoo. Right…here. 'Property of Tim Rackley.'"

"Then you'll let me sled with you?"

"Then I'll let you sled with me."

"Bring on the ink, Big Daddy." His Nextel chirped-radio freq this time-and Dray laughed. "Here we go. Don't mind me. I'll just be here on the couch, sweaty and knocked up."

Tim flipped the phone open, heading back to the kitchen, and keyed "talk."

"Rack, it's Freed."

"How'd it go with the Cholos?"

"How's, 'Chingate, pinche cabron' sound? I'm not really sure how to interpret that."

"Well, we figured, right?"

"I couldn't even get in to see El Viejo-they keep the boss man pretty well shielded. I sat a local unit on the clubhouse. We can't do much more than that. The Cholos buzz out of there like gnats. If the Sinners want to pick 'em off, they'll find a way."

"What are you doing now?"

"After this day? I'm gonna head home and see my kid."

"Don't blame you."

Tim clicked off and dialed the command post.

Haines said, "I told you already, we'll call if anything breaks."

"Anything. My phone is on."

"So you mentioned."

Tim pored over the files as Dray focused on the TV, making occasional wordless exclamations-disgust, contempt, derision. The only thing Dray liked more than watching the news was reviling it.

He spread out the photos, marveling at Goat's face, Kaner's breadth, Den's dark, baleful eyes. He scanned over the crime-scene report, feeling the cold weight of the scientific phrasing. His eyes stuck on the name of his friend.

Six apparent entrance shots to Deputy Frank Palton's torso, two to the head. Skull fragments and soft tissue noted in the mesh and the back of the van.

He flashed on his first day back on the job after Ginny's death, Frankie doing his shtick with Jim, joking about the "Commie Sutra" book his wife had foisted on him. Tim remembered it vividly because it had been his first single moment of levity in three days, the earliest glimmer of a possibility that the world might still be inhabitable. When Tim had gone missing, Palton had been the one to find the blood at the pickup near the cult ranch. Tim pictured the annoyingly endearing batches of photos Frankie used to e-mail out every few months-updates on his daughters' swim-club awards, theme birthday parties, Halloween costumes.

Dray looked over, psychically attuned to Tim's shifts in mood from ten years of marriage. She met his eyes, her face soft with empathy.

"Two kids left behind," Tim heard himself say, as if he and Dray weren't aware of this already.

"Not over there," Dray said gently. "Talk about Frankie's two kids with me over here on the couch. Not when you're a deputy over files." She watched him, the yellow light of a Claritin commercial shining through her translucent, ice green eyes. "Only let it be personal when you're off duty. Otherwise just get it done. That's how you'll honor Frankie's memory. And Hank Mancone's. And Fernando Perez's."

"Who?"

"The illegal guy killed one car over in the blast. Which is my point. If that guy doesn't matter, no one matters. Everyone counts. And everyone counts the same. Getting personal is like putting on blinders. It blocks you from weighing deaths equally, which blocks you from weighing clues equally."

"You're implying I've been hotheaded in the past?"

She laughed. "Never. I'm saying your friend just died. Take a timeout when you need it. Besides, haven't you seen enough of Goat Purdue's fetching smile for one day?"

Tim looked down at the files and pictures spread across the table, let out a breath, and pulled back his shoulders, which he realized had been cramping his chest for the past hour. "What am I supposed to do?"

"You're supposed to feed me." A long pause as they studied each other across the room, both on the verge of a smile. "And yourself."

He got up and looked inside the refrigerator. Save jars of condiments, a browning apple, and the residual legs of a chocolate Santa Claus, it was empty. "I thought you were waiting to eat Santa until Christmas."

"That's four days away."

"I'm gonna have to start hiding food around here."

"There are some sunflower seeds in the cupboard."

"I was hoping for something heartier."

"You," Dray said, "are a Black Hole of Need."

He closed the refrigerator door.

"And while you're out," Dray continued, "can you bring me Strawberry Crush? In the bottles? And Lunchables?"

"Lunchables?"

"Yeah. The turkey ones."

"Right."

He took his newly purchased used Explorer to Albertsons and shoved a cart up and down the aisles, checking his phone-still nothing-and stocking up on everything he could remember Dray eating in the past eight months. No small feat. When he came home, the living room was empty, but he could hear the television going in the bedroom. He peeled off the Lunchables lid, popped open a Crush, and arranged the meal on a silver tray they'd received as a wedding gift from someone they no longer recalled. Across the folded napkin, he laid a clipped grocery-store-diminished Siberian iris-Dray's favorite flower, one of the few girlie indulgences she permitted herself.

She was lying flat as a cadaver on the bed, her tummy sprouting between her boxers and her shoved-back academy T-shirt. Her head rolled to take him in, and then a spontaneous smile reshaped her face and he thought of the first time he saw her smile, in the parking lot at a fire-department fund-raiser. "Timothy Rackley."

He lowered the tray to the mattress and kissed her sweaty bangs. She regarded the food and-through a grin-issued her trademark grimace. "That looks disgusting. Turkey on crackers and strawberry soda? Whose idea was that anyways?"

He handed her the iris, slid the tray onto his lap, and began his dinner.