Assignment: Marriage. Jackie Merritt
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Tuck glanced back to the old sedan and felt a spurt of adrenaline. Something was wrong. Convenience stores were notorious targets for robberies and this setup looked suspicious. He eased back toward his car and then ducked around it, intending to go to the pay phone at the side of the building. In two minutes he could run the sedan’s license plate and receive information on its owner.
All hell suddenly broke loose. The sharp pop of gunshots and a woman’s scream came from within the store. Tuck drew the weapon from the holster in the small of his back and raced for the entrance of the store. He hit the swinging door at a dead run. Two men burst from the back room, guns blazing. Tuck threw himself on the floor and fired at the same time. The men went down.
It was over in seconds. Tuck’s heart felt like it was trying to bust through the wall of his chest. He lay there, breathing hard, sweating. A woman teetered from the back room, holding her hand to her left shoulder, which was wet with blood.
Tuck struggled to his feet. The woman looked dazed. “You shot them,” she said in a hoarse, cracking voice.
He looked at the men on the floor, went over to them and checked each for a pulse. They were young, probably under twenty. One was bearded, one’s head was shaved. He sensed the woman sinking and rushed to help her. He sat her on a box and went to the phone and dialed a number.
“This is Sergeant Tuck Hannigan. Send an ambulance to…” He recited the particulars. “There are two dead and one injured. I killed two men.”
He put the phone down and realized there was blood on the front of his clothes. He looked down at it and felt the onslaught of pain. He’d been hit.
The glaring lights in the store began to blur. He sank to the floor. The last thing he remembered was the wail of sirens and the sight of the two young men, dead, lying in their own blood next to a candy display.
The convenience store shootings made the headlines. Tuck was questioned until he was sick of telling the story. For three days he’d been unaware of the hoopla as he’d been in and out of consciousness in the Intensive Care Unit of Las Vegas’s Humana Hospital. But the day he was moved to the surgical recovery wing, the questions started.
Then there was the hearing. Anytime a police officer was involved in a shooting, he was put on suspension and a hearing was held so the community could assess the situation. Tuck was completely exonerated of any wrongdoing or errors in judgment. The case was clear: he had fired his weapon to protect himself and the female clerk, who’d obviously already been injured.
He had made no mistakes. Everyone told him so and he knew it himself. But it was the first time he’d had to use his service revolver against another human being, and two men had died. Two very young men.
Never mind that they had a record a mile long. Never mind that they had shot the thirty-two-year-old clerk, who had three children, a husband and a mother and father who loved and needed her. The woman was all right, thank God. She, too, had had to endure a stay in the hospital, and physically she was recovering. But she would probably never feel safe again. Tuck worked with victims organizations on occasion, and most people had a hard time getting over the trauma of physical and mental maltreatment.
Regardless that the woman was going to make it and Tuck wasn’t blamed for the shootings, he couldn’t get past the horrifying incident. He had killed two people, two men who weren’t even old enough to vote.
As was strict policy, he had to attend scheduled sessions with one of the department’s psychologists, a Laura Keaton.
Laura was a levelheaded woman, around forty-five, Tuck estimated. He liked her voice, which was low and pleasantly modulated. She talked common sense, too, none of that medical gibberish that he only just barely understood.
This was his second visit to Dr. Keaton’s office. The first had been brief; a handshake, over which she had told him to call her “Laura” and a low-key discussion of departmental routines that had put Tuck at ease.
Today was going to be different he realized when Laura said, “You were married once, Tuck. What happened?”
They were seated on comfortable furniture in a corner of her office, he on the sofa, Laura on a chair. Her brown eyes behind stylish glasses reflected nothing other than a professional interest, both in her question and whatever answer he might give her.
But he couldn’t see what his failed marriage had to do with the present situation. “That was a long time ago, Doc.”
“How long?”
He withheld a rising impatience. “I was twenty-three when I got married. It lasted three years. I’m now thirty-four.”
Laura tented her fingers and regarded the ruggedly handsome man sitting so rigidly before her. Thick dark hair. Somber gray eyes. “You were married the year you joined the force?”
She had her dates down pat. “Yes.”
Laura consulted the folder on her lap. “No children?”
The muscles in Tuck’s jaw clenched. “There was one, a boy. He died at three months of age.”
Laura raised her eyes and drew a slow breath. “I’m sorry. Tell me about it, Tuck.”
He looked away, letting his gaze drift to three filled bookcases, to a painting on the wall that depicted a harbor and a fleet of fishing boats, and finally to her desk. A framed photograph caught his attention. It was of Laura, a smiling, dark-haired man and two teenage boys; her family, obviously.
His eyes returned to Dr. Keaton. “May I smoke?”
She smiled. “I’m not going to lecture you on how bad smoking is for your cardiovascular system, Tuck. Smoke if you’d like.”
“Thanks.” He grinned slightly. “For permission and for not lecturing.”
Laura got up for an ashtray she kept in a desk drawer. She had long ago realized that some people couldn’t speak at all without smoking, and a nervous, incoherent patient was a waste of her time and his. “Are you a heavy smoker?” She sat down again.
“At times.”
“Lately?”
Tuck inhaled the first puff from his cigarette. “Yeah.” He blew out the smoke. “Timmy…that was his name…died of pneumonia. That’s what the doctors said, anyway. What he really died from was neglect.” Tuck looked at the tip of his cigarette intently. “Jeanie, my wife, wasn’t much of a mother. I was still relatively new to the department, working crazy hours, taking on any extra duty I could nail down. I didn’t even know he was sick. I went to work one day…he seemed fine…and they called me from the hospital before my shift was over. He died the next day.”
“It must have been a particularly virulent strain of pneumonia, Tuck,” Laura said softly.
“So they said, and the antibiotics they gave him made him go into convulsions. There wasn’t anything they could do.”
“But you blamed your wife.”
Tuck’s hard eyes met hers. “I still do. She left him that day with a thirteen-year-old girl from the neighborhood. She knew he was sick and she left him with a kid. At least the girl was smart enough to know she had a sick baby on her hands, ‘cause she called 9-1-1. I finally found Jeanie that night in a bar, half drunk and giggling with some joker she’d picked up.”
“And that was the end of your marriage.”
Tuck grinned cynically. “Not a pretty story, is it?”
“I’ve heard worse. What about family? Parents? Brothers and sisters?”
“My dad died when I was fifteen. My mother lives in Phoenix. She came while I was in the hospital, but she’s not very well. No