Chapter Ten
Send me away.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” Morgan came out from behind his desk, offered Annie his hand. She took it and he drew her into a gentle hug, dipping her in shallow feelings of warmth and welcome. “You sure?”
“I have to get out of the city,” she said. “I can’t take it here any longer.”
“Is there anything specific? A problem?”
“No,” she said. “Not really. More just a combination of things.” His office was in an old adobe house on Washington Street. A carved wooden sign outside announced the presence of Operation Delayed Justice.
Inside, a young assistant had greeted her from a desk piled high with legal-sized folders and paperwork. Annie got a sense of barely controlled chaos, as if he lived in a perpetually harried state that probably extended to his home life. He directed her to an inner office that had probably once been a dining room. It was furnished with antiques, mostly the sorts of things that would have been in a home office rather than a corporate one, with artwork on two walls and massive, crowded bookshelves lining the others. “I guess I’ve never been here before,” she told Morgan.
“I don’t think so, no.”
“It’s nice.”
“Thanks,” Morgan said. He came across just as comfortable as he had before. If everyone was as even-keeled as Morgan was, Annie might not mind the empathy so much. It was almost like there was a layer missing in him that more emotional people had, extra depths to their feelings that made them hard to be around. He might have been superficial, but at this point she appreciated that. “Why don’t you have a seat, Annie, and let’s talk about the job.”
He had a couple of old Mexican chairs flanking his desk. He led Annie to one of them and she sat down. The wood was cool and rigid against her back, smooth under her hands where hundreds of other people had probably rubbed the same spot. “You mind telling me what made up your mind?” he asked, perching on the corner of his oak desk.
“Like I said, a combination of things. I’ve always lived in Phoenix, but I think I’m ready for a change. The city is so big now, so crowded, and the racket—the emotional noise—is getting to me in a way it never did before. Plus, without the job, I don’t really have that much to tie me here. No more family, no boyfriend.” She swallowed once and continued. “It’s hard to admit, but I guess I don’t have a lot of really close friends, period. So why stay here if I have a chance to go someplace that’s a little easier to take?”
“I hoped you’d feel that way, slugger, and I hope it’s a good move for you. And like I said, it doesn’t have to be permanent. The job will be done before too long, and then you can stay there, look for someplace else to move, or come back here. Entirely up to you.”
“Thanks, Morgan.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of arranging a place for you to live,” he said. “It’s nothing fancy, but it’s comfortable, and it’s not too far from the prison.”
Annie smiled. “You were pretty sure I’d take the job?”
“I hoped so. But even if you didn’t, someone has to go out there, and whoever does will need a place to live.”
“That’s true, I guess.”
“Utilities are being billed here. And I’ve had a phone put in, since cell phone reception is kind of sketchy out there.” He smiled and handed her a sheaf of papers. “I also took the liberty of writing you letters of introduction to the local sheriff’s office and the prison staff. And Johnny Ortega’s file is in here, court transcripts, the whole boat.”
“That’s the guy in prison?”
“That’s right. Everything you’ll need before you talk to him is in there. When you do talk to him, I’m sure you’ll be as convinced as I am.”
“We’ll see. If I’m not, what then?”
He moved around behind the desk, pulled open his top drawer, and took out a checkbook. “Then we’ll pay you for whatever time you spent on the case, and you can move on to something else. Or we can see if there’s another case open for which you’d be a better fit.”
He wrote out a check, ripped it from the book, and handed it over. “This’ll get you started,” he said. “I’ve got some paperwork for you to fill out, and then you’ll be on the payroll.”
“I want you to know how much I appreciate this, Morgan,” Annie said. “All of it.” Since running into the scary guy on Mill Avenue, she had thought about almost nothing except getting out of the city. She was empty inside, unless someone else’s emotions filled her up, and she couldn’t live like that. Maybe in solitude, out in the country, she could rediscover herself.
She had to try, anyway. She had to do something before she encountered another homicidal person in the street and snapped.
The worst year of Annie’s life had been her thirtieth. It had begun the morning after her twenty-ninth birthday party, when she had awakened with a hangover and the sensation that she had dragged her tongue along the street all the way home from the bar. Through the pounding headache and occasional dashes into the bathroom, she realized that the reason she had allowed herself to get so stinking drunk was that she was terrified of reaching thirty, and it was downhill from here to there, and then beyond. She was still a uniformed patrol cop and desperately worried that she would never make detective. And she was policing a city that had ballooned in size over the past decade; growth that showed signs of speeding up, not slowing down. With that expansion came big city problems—gangs, drugs, jumps in domestic violence, gun violence, vehicle theft, rape, child abuse. Everything bad about cities was coming to Phoenix while everything she had loved about the city was being squeezed out. And in uniform, all she could do was try to stay on top of it, not dig in and try to deal with the root causes of it. She felt like a stranger in her native city, and it frustrated the hell out of her.
Her year got worse from there. The man Annie was supposed to marry, a pilot for America West, got feet so cold he must have frozen the twenty-three-year-old nymphet he’d hooked up with three months before the wedding. Ongoing car repairs set her back several thousand dollars, most of her savings—so much that if it had happened all at once she would have just bought a new one. She went out one morning and found her neighbor’s cat, which visited her so often that they practically shared custody, dead in the gutter, hit by a truck. A few weeks before her thirtieth, her dad was wounded on the job and died three days later. Nothing went right that year, it seemed, professionally or personally. She had known cops who ate their guns when they hit stretches not half as prolonged or painful. By the time the dreaded birthday hit, she welcomed it, because nothing on the other side of it could be worse than what she had survived on the approach.
This year, since the day of the explosion, seemed on course to dwarf it.
Annie recognized that by accepting Morgan’s job offer, she was running away from her problems instead of facing them. She didn’t care. How did you face partial deafness? How did you face being battered by the emotions of strangers you ran into on the street? Answer: you didn’t. You turned tail and ran, you went someplace where the population density was something like one person per square mile, and if anyone was going to talk to you it was because you had sought that person out.
Sometimes running away was the only rational response. And Annie was a big believer in rational responses. She would run as far as it took.
It was the fourteenth of March before Annie was able to get on the road. She got her condo closed up, and Nanci agreed to come around twice a week to check on it. Torn between feelings of abandonment and relief, Nanci promised to collect her mail and send anything important over to the house Morgan had arranged in New Mexico. Her utilities would be left on, and she had a couple of lamps and a radio set with timers to go on and off occasionally, in order to make outsiders think the condo was occupied.
She packed three suitcases with clothes for spring and summer, made a shopping trip to Poisoned Pen for enough thrillers to last her a few months, loaded a DVD player, a stereo, and a box full of DVDs and CDs into the trunk, since it sounded like streaming entertainment might not be an option. Her ears still buzzed constantly but she could enjoy music again, even watch TV without captions. In the backseat she put a box of food and utensils, and a cooler for perishables. She took two handguns, a Glock 17 and a Beretta Px4 Storm. She didn’t wear a badge anymore, but she had been on the job long enough that she still needed a firearm close at hand. She packed several flashlights—since being deafened, she had discovered that she hated the darkness. When she couldn’t hear what was inside it, she wanted to be able to see, and she had bought flashlights of every size and description, stationing them throughout her condo. Although her hearing was better, the flashlights had become habit and she took most of them along.
Under a bright sun, she headed down Interstate 10, leaving behind the city’s crime and noise, traffic and smog, every friend she had in the world, most of her possessions and the entirety of her past. Her future waited a little more than two hundred miles away, in another town, another state.
It might as well have been another world.