Shots rang out. At first, Jayden Powell had thought a car had backfired. Ducking behind a tree by instinct, he identified the source as gunfire seconds before the sound came again and he fell backward with the force to his chest. Upper left. The only part not shielded by the trunk he’d been using for cover.
Lying still, in agony, his head turned to the side on the unevenly cut lawn, Jayden played dead, figuring that’s what the perp wanted: him dead. Praying that it was enough. That the guy wouldn’t shoot again, just for spite. Or kicks.
A long blade of grass stuck up his nose. Tickling. Irritating. Damn. If he sneezed, he’d be dead. Killed again—by a sneeze. Did his breathing show? Should he try to hold his breath?
Why wasn’t he hearing sirens?
They were in Santa Raquel, California. It was an oceanside town with full police protection—not some burg where they had to wait on County, like some of the other places he served.
His nose twitched. Had to be two blades of grass. One up inside trying to crawl back into his throat. One poking at the edge of his nostril. Maybe if his chest burned a little more, he wouldn’t notice. Maybe if someone mowed once in a while, a guy could play dead in the front yard without fear of exposure.
Where in the hell was Jasper? His sometime partner and fellow probation officer, Leon Jasper, had waited in the car on this one, just as Jayden, the senior of the two, had insisted. Harold Wallace was Jayden’s offender. His newest client. He preferred first meets to be one-on-one.
Good thing, too, or Leon would be lying right next to him—and the guy had a wife with a kid on the way. A boy. No...maybe a girl. Had he actually heard yet?
Jayden was going to sneeze. If he took another breath, he’d be dead for sure. Maybe just a small inhalation through the mouth. Slow and long and easy, just like he’d been doing. Right?
Shouldn’t have let his mouth fall open. Now he had grass there, too. It tasted like sour bugs and...
Sirens blared in the distance. An unmistakable sound.
Thank God.
Prosecutor Emma Martin was having a chicken salad sandwich in her office when a paralegal stopped to tell her that there’d been a shooting and an officer was down. Immediately concerned, she could hardly get the bite in her mouth past her dry throat.
“Is he alive?” she asked Kenny, the best paralegal she’d ever worked with. Married with three kids, Kenny was an integral part of the mechanism that kept the district attorney’s office running smoothly. At the moment, Emma wanted to run out and help gather every detail that would put a cop-shooting perpetrator behind bars for good.
“Yeah, he was wearing his vest, thank God,” Kenny told her, his balding head bobbing up and down a couple of times to punctuate his words. Something so intrinsically him, the bob had become a “Kenny” trademark. “He’s at the hospital but insisted on going in his own car.”
“He drove himself?”
“I heard his partner took him.”
Ready to leave her lunch behind and get on the case, to be ready to help obtain warrants and find the culprit as soon as possible, if she was assigned the case, she asked, “Who was it?”
“Powell.”
Her jaw dropped. The man she’d been thinking about while eating lunch?
“Jayden Powell?” she asked, heart thudding for no valid reason. She already knew the probation officer was okay.
And it wasn’t like she knew him personally.
Or even wanted to.
She’d been planning to call him, though. To request a sit-down. This morning, one of his client’s names had come up at the meeting of the High Risk team—a group comprised of professionals from the fields of education, medicine, law, counseling, domestic violence shelter workers and law enforcement who came together with the sole purpose of preventing domestic violence deaths.
Had Bill Heber, the offender she’d needed to speak with Powell about, been involved in the morning’s shooting?
“Is the shooter in custody?” If it was Bill, that would be great news.
“Yeah. Shame, too. It was the thirteen-year-old son of the offender. Powell had set up a first meet at the guy’s home.” A “first meet.” The offender was newly out on parole if Powell was seeing him on the outside for the first time.
“Was his partner hit, too?”
“No, Powell insisted the guy wait in the car.”
Powell had been doing a first meet at the home of an offender who was already armed just two days after getting out? Reading the guy’s record, in prison and before, should have given Powell some indication that he might want to schedule that meet in a more protected setting...
Reckless.
And fitting, too, from what she’d heard about Powell. He went all out for the job, which was good, but he was also known as a bit of risk-taker.
Those were the types of men she usually went for. Which was why she’d been thinking about him over lunch. Worrying over the call she had to make. She wasn’t going to let herself be at all sidetracked by desires that had never served her well.
“I’m assuming they brought the offender in, too?” A newly released parolee wasn’t permitted on any premises with guns. Possible charges, degrees of same, popped into her brain.
“They held him for questioning, but no, they aren’t keeping him. He’s the one who disarmed the shooter, his own son. Wasn’t Wallace’s gun. And he had no idea it was on the premises. Turns out,” he continued, “when the kid heard his dad tell his girlfriend some officer was coming to the house, the kid stole the gun from a friend’s brother and backtracked to the house instead of going to school. His dad didn’t even know he was there. Kid’s filled with a boatload of anger. Blames all law enforcement for the fact that his father was put away to begin with. I have a feeling some bad stuff is going to be coming out there—things that happened to the kid while the dad was locked up.”
Wow. Okay, then. Possibility off her desk. Minors were not in her area of responsibility.
And the offender wasn’t Bill Heber, either—an offender she’d never forget. The forty-two-year-old abuser and his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Suzie, didn’t have any children.
Not since the night, four years before, when Bill had beaten his pregnant bride so badly she’d lost the baby she was carrying.
Emma had caught that case. Charged him with attempted murder for Suzie, and second-degree murder for the almost-four-month gestational-aged fetus. And had failed to get the conviction. If she’d gone for lesser abuse charges, she probably would have won. Bill would have been sentenced to four years, served two, and been out. She’d been trying to put the bastard away for life. To protect Suzie for life.
As it turned out, Heber had landed his ass in jail anyway, for breaking and entering. Not her case. But she’d heard he’d been convicted, sentenced to five years and served two. He’d been out for three months and, according to Suzie’s physician at the High Risk team meeting that morning, the woman was badly bruised again. Thank God for the creation of the High Risk team, whose members were legally permitted to report suspected abuse and who, on coming together, were able to get a more complete picture of a victim’s circumstances. Sara Havens Edwin, lead counselor at The Lemonade Stand—the unique, resort-like women’s shelter in Santa Raquel that had led to the formation of the High Risk team—was charged by the team with keeping in contact with Suzie. Something she’d been doing anyway.
Emma’s planned move had been to meet with Bill’s current PO: Jayden Powell. A man who was dangerous to her in a completely nonabusive way. His bad-boy way of going beyond protocol, his sexy body—they called to Emma’s lesser being. The shadow side of the hardworking, caring, responsible woman she’d always thought herself to be.
That hidden, foolish woman who consistently went for the wrong guys and had the deep burns to prove it.
If it had been left up to him, Jayden would have gone back to the office that afternoon. He could have pushed the point, but figured he’d get more done from home where he could move judiciously and cringe now and then without someone harping at him to rest or take a pill.
No paid meds for him. Or alcohol, either, if he could help it. He didn’t have an addictive personality, thank God, or any sign of alcohol dependency. He just didn’t like anything messing with his brain.
Or his ability to make decisions. Alcohol contributed to foolish choices—sometimes life-changing ones—and a man was accountable to those choices when he sobered up.
Had to live with the ramifications forever.
He’d learned that lesson the hard way—and his self-imposed penance was the solitary life he lived.
Looking at the massive bruising around his left ribs, he figured he’d gotten off lightly that day. No cracks or breaks. And no blunt force trauma to internal organs. Just discomfort and bruising.
That, he could live with.
His nose had quit itching, too. Thank God. The damned grass had driven him nuts.
In his softest, oldest, hole-spattered T-shirt, a leftover from the police academy, and a pair of gray running shorts, he wandered barefoot out to the kitchen. He looked at the unopened six-pack on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator—the only alcohol in the house—and opted for a fruit-flavored sports drink.
Maybe he’d have a beer with dinner. Or before bed. Lying down wasn’t going to be all that pleasant, according to what the emergency room doc had said in his release instructions.
Moving into the extra bedroom, he sat at the desk, flipped on the 70-inch flat-screen TV hung on the opposite wall, and picked up the phone. Every time he left the office, he had his calls forwarded to the home line. Or to his cell if he was going to be away overnight. The message light was blinking on the answering machine. He’d get to those.
Opening the file he’d dropped on his desk when he’d come in, he dialed.
“Pick up, Wallace,” he said aloud, reminding himself to feed the goldfish he’d purchased when he’d realized he was talking to himself too much. And then he remembered the feral cat he’d taken in had eaten the fish. He was not caregiver material.
He’d fed the cat that morning. That was a plus.
Three rings and then four. The man had been released and told to go home. If he—
“Yeah?”
“It’s Jayden Powell.” Officer Powell would have been better.
“Yeah.”
“What’s up with your kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Whose gun was it?”
“Some gangbanger brother of a kid I coached in T-ball, for Christ’s sake.” At one time Wallace had been Joe Dad, a banker climbing the ranks and doing well for himself and his family. And then he’d had an affair and gotten hooked on meth, which had derailed his life. He’d gone to prison for fraud, but on a plea deal.
His wife had died while he was in prison. Though he’d tried to get the courts to let his girlfriend take his son, the boy had ended up in the foster care system—until two days before when Wallace had been released early on good behavior.
“You still clean?” Jayden asked, though he knew if the guy wasn’t, he wouldn’t get a straight answer.
“I am. I peed for the cops today, just to prove it, too.”
Good man, Jayden had thought after he’d read the man’s file and watched a tape of his parole hearing. “I gave you the benefit of the doubt, meeting at your home, alone, as you asked,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You owe me some good behavior.”
“I owe myself and my son good behavior. I don’t know what the hell I owe you. More than that, I’m sure. My kid shot you today.”
And that was the crux of the matter, as far as Jayden was concerned. He needed his client to succeed at reacclimating to the outside. A son in jail and facing charges, his offender blaming himself, wasn’t a promising start.
“What about Bettina? Where’s she at with all this?” Jayden asked about the woman Wallace’d had the affair with, the woman he was still with. The one who’d turned him on to meth. And, ironically enough, Bettina was the reason the courts had let Wallace’s son leave foster care. She had no criminal record and had already been in the process of petitioning for his care.
“Telling me not to blame myself. Yeah, right.”
“Is she clean?”
“She never was hooked,” Wallace told him. “Only tried it a couple of times. I let her down, too, when I got hooked. But she stuck by me.”
“And now?”
“She says Tyler needs me, she needs me, and I better keep my stuff straight.”
“I’ll help any way I can. I know a lot of people. Can try to smooth things for the kid.” What the kid had done was wrong. But he’d done it out of panic and love for his father. To defend his father. There was still a chance for him to turn his life around. And doing that was the best shot Jayden had at getting his client successfully reentered into society.
“He shot you, man!”
“From what they told me today, he had it rough in the system. Heard you talking to Bettina about my visit, was afraid I was taking you back... Why don’t you let people show you what they can do before you automatically assume they’ll disappoint you?” He’d said the same to Bill Heber in his most recent conversation. That parolee was one he knew better, one who’d passed every single one of Jayden’s tests, being where he was supposed to be, doing what he was supposed to be doing, on every surprise visit. And Heber’s response had been pretty much the same as Wallace’s was then. Complete silence.
“I’ll be by in the morning,” Jayden said. “Same time. You going to be there?”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t any kind of assurance that life would go well for Wallace. Or that he’d manage to not join the statistics of repeat offenders. But it was a start.
Jayden was all about new starts.