Baby, Baby, Baby. Mary Mcbride
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heavy blue garment just before kicking in the front door and walking into the wrong end of a .44 Magnum and the path of a cop-killer bullet.
The damned thing had blown him backward through the dealership’s dirty plate-glass window, practically out onto the street. He remembered lying there, in all that broken glass, looking up at a bright blue sky and thinking it was a shame that he was dead because all of a sudden he knew how badly he’d screwed up with Melanie and he realized just what he needed to do to fix things. If ever somebody had craved a do-over, it was Sonny just then.
As it turned out, when the bullets had stopped flying and the dust had settled, he hadn’t been dead or even that badly injured. The impact of the bullet had cracked a rib and the subsequent collision with the pavement outside had given him a concussion. Maybe that was good. Maybe he’d needed a brutal jab to his heart and a thorough shaking of his head to see things straight. Now all he had to do was convince his ex-wife that he was no longer the selfish son of a bitch who had ruined their marriage.
“There you are.” Mike Kaczinski came up beside him. He set the candle he was carrying down on the counter next to the sink. “You feeling okay, Son?”
“Oh, sure.”
“How’s the rib?”
“Fine.” Sonny shrugged. “It only hurts when I breathe.”
“And the head?”
“That’s fine, too. It only hurts when I think.”
Mike chuckled softly. “Well, that shouldn’t be a problem, then.”
The candle flame barely cut the darkness around the two friends as they stood there side by side. They’d met in grade school, gotten in all the obligatory trouble together in high school, shared a room at college, and then finally cheered each other through the police academy. Mike had been Sonny’s best man, not just at his wedding, but in every sense of the word.
Like Sonny, he wore his dark brown hair on the long side, the better to blend in on the street. Unlike Sonny, he’d gone home every night to a solid, happy marriage for the past ten years.
Now the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out the window at the rectangle of yellow light on the second floor next door.
“She’s planning to get pregnant next week from a freaking sperm bank.” Sonny’s voice barely rose above a rough whisper.
“Yeah. I heard.”
“I’m not going to let that happen, Mikey.”
“Yeah. I figured.”
When the last reveler drove off into the wee small hours of the morning, Melanie slipped back into bed, beat her pillow to a pulp, and pulled the covers up over her head. Okay. So she wasn’t going to wake up in the morning to find it was all a bad dream. It was a living nightmare, and she was going to have to deal with it one way or another.
She’d be damned if she’d stay barricaded behind locked doors. Sonny was just going to have to move. Seattle would be nice. Hong Kong would be even better. A bit closer, there was a house around the corner on Garland Boulevard that Dieter Weist and his partner had almost completed so Sonny wouldn’t have to be bothered with all the drudgery that went along with rehabing. He didn’t know the first thing about rehabing anyway. Good grief. When she’d lived with him in his loft, he hadn’t even owned a screwdriver or a hammer to put a picture up on a wall, much less known how to use either one.
What was he planning to do? Live in that hovel next door while plaster rained down on his head and garbage squished under his feet?
He didn’t even have electricity yet, for heaven’s sake. No plumbing, either, judging from the Day-Glo-colored Porta Potty that she had spied tucked behind the dilapidated back porch.
Why was he doing this? She wanted to rip open the shutters and wrench up the window and scream, “It’s over. It didn’t work, Sonny. Just—for God’s sake—let it go.”
If she did that, though, he’d only yell back, “You love me, Mel. You know it.”
Dammit. She punched the pillow again and dug herself deeper into the mattress. That was the problem. She did love him. She just couldn’t live with him.
If only she’d known that when he’d handed her those two glasses of champagne and then shucked his disguise like some gorgeous butterfly emerging from a hairy cocoon. If only his voice with its too-much-whiskey and too-many-smokes timbre hadn’t sent a cascade of tingles down her spine when he’d called her darlin’ the first time, as in “Let’s get out of here, darlin’.”
Melanie was far too practical, way too levelheaded to be swept off her feet, so she’d finally come to the conclusion that Sonny must have drugged her those few weeks before they’d gotten married. That first night, after they’d left the awards ceremony and after he’d showered and changed at the precinct, they’d sat in the back booth of a little jazz club, the sparks between them nearly setting the place on fire.
No one had ever made her feel like the molten center of the universe before. No one had ever made her forget what time it was, what day it was, what century. No one had ever gotten her into bed on the very first date and then gotten her to stay there for an entire weekend.
He had to have drugged her.
It wasn’t just the sex. During those early weeks Sonny had made her feel like a new person, somebody completely recreated. She’d never once made a list of any kind. She’d barely even opened her planner except to make certain there was no official function that would prevent her from being with her man.
Sonny had been with her constantly—24/7 as they said in the department—because, like now, he’d been on vacation following a shooting. He’d been sexy and funny and charming and attentive and sweet and…
…And in her drugged, delirious condition she’d married him one afternoon at city hall in Judge Beckmann’s chambers with Sam Venneman as her maid of honor and Mike Kaczinski as his best man.
Then Sonny’s time off work had ended and she’d hardly seen him anymore. It seemed her then-new husband’s view of the ideal marriage was one where he worked long hours, sometimes two and three days at a time, undercover on the street, then came home expecting the honeymoon to continue under the covers with his irritated bride.
No sooner had she tidied up his messy loft than he stumbled in to fling newspapers everywhere, to put T-shirts in his sock drawer, to rip out the neatly tucked covers from the foot of the mattress to accommodate his long legs, to claim he couldn’t make plans for the future because he didn’t even know what he’d be doing next week.
She’d made lists and Sonny had made excuses.
After six months, during four of which she’d had a headache that felt like a cannonball inside her skull, Melanie had walked out and filed for divorce.
For his part, Sonny went through an approximation of the Five Stages of Grief. Denial: “There’s nothing wrong with our marriage, babe.” Anger: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Bargaining: “I can change, Mel.” Depression: “Aw, hell, darlin’. Why don’t you just stick a knife in my heart and get it over with?”
Finally, or so she’d thought when he’d stopped calling her constantly and dropping by city hall every other day, he’d reached the last stage. Acceptance.
Obviously she’d been wrong about that. Sonny hadn’t changed a bit. He never would. He’d always be his spur-of-the-moment, let-the-devil-take-tomorrow, what-me-worry, haphazard self. And she’d always be the worrier, the list maker, the Queen of Post-It notes and the planner.
The twain would never meet.
And one of the twain, dammit, would have to go.
Melanie squeezed her eyes closed, determined to wrench at least a few hours sleep from the chaos that suddenly surrounded her.
Next door, at that precise