His hand went behind his back. Garreth braced for a gun, but Wayne produced a buck knife he pressed against the side of Sharon’s neck.
Toews sighed. “Oh, shit, Wayne, you don’t want to do that.”
The folksy approach made Garreth revise his initial assessment of Toews from Barney Fife to Andy Taylor. But if Toews had a strategy other trying to talk Wayne into giving up, Garreth did not see it…and what were the chances of that considering his and Sharon’s comments about Wayne’s temperament. Too bad Wayne could not be hypnotized from here. Another approach might work, though.
“I’ll get around behind him,” he whispered to Toews.
Toews frowned. “You don’t need — ”
“It’s all she deserves the way she’s treated me!”
Garreth circled the rear of the patrol car to the far side of the alley. Hunching low, he ran silently along the wall…hunching even lower across the twelve feet between Toews and the pickup.
“How about how you’ve treated her,” came Verl’s angry voice.
Garreth peered over the pickup bed to see the back door of the Main Street open and Verl standing in it with a shotgun.
Wayne shouted, “You point that thing at me and she’s dead, old man!”
“Go back inside, Verl,” Toews said. “Please.”
Garreth reached the pickup cab…saw the lock button down on the passenger door. Shit. Well, what were the chances of opening the door without being heard anyway.
Garreth gritted his teeth in anticipation of pain and leaned into the door…
Wrench!
…and knelt doubled on the seat with jaw clenched, holding his breath to prevent any groan giving away his presence.
Outside, Sharon’s whimper indicated she had regained consciousness. Garreth pictured her eyes wide with fear.
Wayne snarled, “Both of you get the fuck out of here before I count to ten or I’m cutting this bitch’s throat!”
Sharon squeaked in terror.
“Ten, nine…”
“Wayne, be sensible, amigo. You know your mother wouldn’t approve of this.”
“Leave my mother out of this! Eight!”
They sounded almost to the door. There was no time for pain to fade. When Wayne reached the door, he would have his back to it for a second or two at most, before turning to push Sharon inside. Garreth forced himself to move, sliding forward behind the steering wheel to the edge of the seat.
“Seven…” Wayne backed up to the door. “Six…”
Now!
Garreth reached out…knocked off Wayne’s ball cap with one hand to grab his hair, and wrapped the other hand around Wayne’s knife hand. He wrenched the knife hand sideways away from Sharon’s neck, feeling bones crack in his grip. Unconsciousness cut off Wayne’s scream as Garreth slammed his head sideways into the door frame.
Wayne’s knees buckled. Garreth leaped from the cab, pushing Wayne clear of where he dropped Sharon…at the same time plucking the knife from the crushed hand and jamming the blade down between the glass and frame of the driver’s door.
Then he stepped over the sprawling Wayne and scooped up Sharon. “Okay, it’s over. You’re safe.”
She buried her head against him, bursting into tears.
The smell of the blood enveloped him, setting fire to Garreth’s throat. It smelled so sweet, and he longed to know how it tasted. With her bleeding chin so close to his mouth, he fought not to lick the wound.
Toews and Verl reached them seconds later.
“It looks like Wayne hit his head and knocked himself out,” Garreth said. “Do we call an ambulance or just throw him in the back of the truck to transport him?”
“I vote for the truck,” Verl said.
Toews smiled but lifted his radio off his belt and thumbed the mike. “Three Baumen. Doris, we need the ambulance behind Wolffe’s Jewelry for a prisoner going to the ER. Just to avoid any police brutality nonsense,” he said to them. “I’ll wait here for it. Verl, you and Mikaelian take Sharon in.”
4
Unlike San Francisco General, the ER at St. Francis smelled mostly of disinfectant. Garreth breathed that happily while he and Verl sat in the waiting room alone, with Sharon the only patient until Fire Rescue’s ambulance brought Wayne in. The doctor diagnosed Sharon’s injuries as abrasions of the hands and knees, a laceration on her chin needing two stitches, and the worst injury, a bad bruise and cracked rib where the door handle struck her back. Toews recorded the visible injuries on her with Polaroids while Dr. Lawrence moved on to examining Wayne.
“I think he was going to grab me as I came out!” Sharon said, voice trembling. “But I’d already left to walk home. I looked back and there he was, driving straight at me!” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “I thought he was going to kill me!”
Toews laid the drying Polaroids on a table beside the ER cart. “Well you don’t have to worry about him again. This will put him away for a long time.”
“Which is too bad for his parents,” Toews added after Verl drove her home. “They’re good people and have tried to bring their kids up right.”
He used the ER phone to call them while the doctor finished Wayne’s examination and studied his x-rays. On the cart Wayne cursed and writhed in obvious agony, his good wrist handcuffed to the cart’s side rail, his injured one wrapped in ice bags.
“How’d they take it?” Garreth when Toews hung up.
Toews sighed. “I woke them up of course. That made it worse for them. Earl sounded like he’d been expecting something like this. Dottie was crying in the background.”
Garreth sighed in turn. “I always hate family notifications. At least you didn’t have to say we killed him.”
They stood silent for several minutes, until Toews said, “You know, it seems to me you do want to be a cop. You didn’t have to deal with Wayne in the Main Street. You didn’t have to follow me to the alley. You didn’t have to go after Wayne there. But you did…I’m thinking without ever considering not getting involved. Because it’s what you do…what you are.”
Garreth grimaced. “Which got my partner shot.”
Toews shrugged. “I didn’t see any sign of you freezing up tonight. And you weren’t a cowboy. It all looked cooly calculated to me.”
Dr. Lawrence came over to them.
“Your man has a moderate concussion. Nothing that ought to cause permanent damage. But…every metacarpal in his hand is fractured, with multiple fractures of the first and fifth metacarpals. It’s like his hand got caught in a vice.”
Toews glanced at Garreth. “That’s some grip you have.”
Garreth put on a shrug. “Adrenalin is amazing stuff.”
Inwardly he winced. He needed to be more careful about how much strength he used. Wayne did not necessarily deserve to be maimed for being a bastard. What was that saw about walking softly and carrying a big stick? In his case, because he had a very big stick he needed to sure he walked softly indeed to avoid tripping himself.
5
Once Wayne had been tucked into the surgery ward with pain killers and a guard Toews introduced as Alan Serk, a reserve officer formerly a highway trooper, they finally left. Standing outside breathing in the night air, Toews said, “I can answer your question now.”
Garreth blinked. “What question?”
“You asked earlier whether I would trust you to back me up. The answer is yes. Yes, I would trust you.”
Garreth felt his throat catch.
Toews raised a brow. “If you’re not bushed from hunting ancestors, bussing dishes, and taking down Wayne, how about riding along with me for a while.”
He ended up riding along until the end of the tour at four.
“How do you come to have an eight to four shift?” he asked as they walked Kansas Avenue checking store doors.
“It’s Chief Danzig’s way of making six sworn officers — five now, not including him — an effective force. We have five shifts, four with one officer each, but overlapping so the periods of greatest activity are covered by at least two and often three officers. I’m alone now until four, and Bill Pfannenstiel is for the first four hours of his shift, but that isn’t usually a problem since it’s almost always dead quiet after midnight, even with the bars being open until one. Except for DUI’s on Friday and Saturday, when the weekend drinkers come out to play.”