Page 7 of Shield
The cop walked back in. “Okay?” he asked, and I nodded as he sat down in the other chair, seriousness lingering around him like a second shadow. His voice was gruff, each word pointed, each question sharp, as if trying to carve the truth out of what I’d seen.
“So, take me back. You walked in on the scene?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s something you do? I mean, you have access?”
I tapped the card on the small table next to me. “I’m allowed. I volunteer here. I was taking Joe some coffee, and the files are families that might need some help.” I tried to gather my scattered thoughts. “I was just cheering Joe up. He’s been through a lot with the clinic here. But when I got here…” The image of Joe, pale and bleeding, flashed before my eyes.
Jackson caught the change in my expression. “Take your time,” he said, his gruff expression softening for a moment before he composed himself back into the detective persona.
I cleared my throat, uncomfortable with how this vulnerability felt. “I knocked and came in. There was Joe, slumped over, and that… that guy pointing the gun. It all happened so fast.” My hands clenched as if I could imagine Joe’s blood still there.
“You didn’t recognize the assailant?” Jackson asked, flipping through his notes. Our witness had short, kind of scruffy blond hair, along with a five o'clock shadow, and he was a long way past tired, his eyes bloodshot. He shifted in his chair again, and it creaked, because he was a big guy, broad and solid, and I was trying hard not to move on my chair to prevent the entire thing from collapsing. “Mr. Cowan?”
I snapped back to the questions. “Sorry, no, never saw him before.”
“And can you describe him?”
“Skinny guy, lots of scars on his face, a neck tattoo that was just a blur, smiley face tattoo on his hand. Uhmm… I don’t know if this matters, but he smelled as if he hadn’t showered in days, and his dental hygiene was bad, and I meanbad.”
“Everything matters, Mr. Cowan.”
“Oliver. Please, call me Oliver.”
He glanced up at me, as if he was going to argue, but then he nodded. “I’m Jackson.”
“Okay.”
“Do you remember what he was wearing?”
“Gang stuff maybe. T-shirt with no sleeves, grubby, blue I think, and dark pants that rode low. Belt, with a knife hanging off it, and the gun, of course.” I shuddered as I recalled the asshole leaning over Joe, and the way Joe was fighting to stay conscious. “That’s all I recall… wait… he wore Converse, old ones, he stepped in the…” In the blood. Nausea washed over me, and I swallowed hard. There was no way I was going to vomit in front of the grumpy, exhausted, but hot-as-fuck detective.
Hot?
Great, now my situational awareness was all messed up—no one thinks about how hot a cop is after an attempted murder. Right?
“Promise me you won’t stop looking.” Melissa’s voice filled my head—we’d always appreciated men together. Me being bi meant we had an entire world of guys to check out, and she made me promise to never stop looking. Grief shoved at my brain, and the single positive outcome was that it beat my nausea down a few notches. Grief was all-consuming and fucking hard to fight, but it was also incredibly powerful and knocked anything else I might feel on its ass.
“We have his shoe print,” Jackson confirmed, and of course, they did. I bet they’d been over that office with a fine-toothed comb. “So, what conversation did you hear?”
“Well, I didn’t hear what he and Joe were talking about, because Joe was already reeling from the blow to the head, uhm…” I blinked at him as I attempted to recall the exact words the assailant had used. “I asked him something. I don’t know what. It could have just been a squeak, or I inhaled, or whatever. He told me to shut up, pointed the gun at Joe, and… and…” I could feel my heart pounding as the terror of the moment returning in a visceral rush.
“And what?” Jackson pressed, his gaze locking onto mine, unyielding and expectant.
I thought he was going to shoot Joe and then me. I hadn’t seen my life flash before my eyes. None of that shit was true. I’d just seen the man’s eyes as they narrowed. “Brown eyes,” I blurted. “He had dark brown eyes. I just remembered.”
Jackson dutifully wrote that down.
I carried on. “Then, he left. Just ran out as if threatening people’s lives was nothing to him.” Anger surged at the memory, at the helplessness of it all.
Jackson nodded, scribbling something in his notebook. He glanced at me again, his gaze searching. “What did you do after he left?”
“I went straight to Joe. I caught him before he hit the floor.” The feeling of Joe’s weight against me was still too present, too real. “I called 911 right after. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You did good,” Jackson said, his voice not quite gruff now. It was an affirmation that sounded like something that rarely escaped his lips. “Then what?”
“I came out here, and that’s when I found Heloise.”
