held his breath and squeezed off two rounds.
* * *
HALF AN HOUR LATER, amidst the crackle and hiss of radios and the rapid-fire questions of a gap-toothed detective, his heart was still hammering against his ribs.
“Three dead,” said the grizzled sergeant, “counting the perp.” Eyes on Hunter, he added, “Great shots, rookie. Bet he fell over like a tree, huh.” He faced the suit. “You got somebody lined up to do notifications?”
Hunter didn’t hear the answer, because his brain had seized on three dead. The woman, the perp... He hung his head. And Jack.
The detective blew his breath out through his teeth and studied Hunter. “If we do things right, maybe it won’t have a negative impact on your probation.”
If he could find his voice, Hunter would have told him that his police career had ended the minute he closed his eyes in the car. Cops—his brothers among them—would never let him forget he’d fallen asleep on the job. He would never let himself forget.
If he’d gone into the convenience store with Jack, the holdup probably wouldn’t have gone down. Surely not even a strung-out thief was idiot enough to take on two armed cops.
His little nap cost his partner and a civilian their lives.
CHAPTER TWO
Fifteen Years Later
Brooke watched her father fall to his knees, sobbing. Heard her sister, Beth, wail as the surgeon said, “We did everything we could, but...” Mom had only gone to the 24/7 store because they ran out of ice cream halfway through their straight-A girls’ movie marathon. The young uniformed officer in the waiting room kept repeating, “Sorry. Sorry. Oh, my God, I’m sorry....”
IT WASN’T THE young cop, she realized, groggily coming to, but the phone ringing.
Grabbing it, Brooke glanced at the bedside clock. Who but that idiot Donald would call at ten past three?
Still reeling from the haunting images of her recurring nightmare, she hauled herself out of bed and clicked Talk as she headed downstairs.
“Are you aware what time it is?” she whispered into the handset, determined not to wake her sleeping nephew.
There was a pause, and then an unfamiliar voice said, “I, uh... Sorry to disturb you, ma’am.”
So it wasn’t Donald after all. Now she wished she’d taken a second to put on her slippers, because the tiles felt like ice beneath her bare feet. Wished it had been Donald, because no one called at this hour with good news. Her thoughts went to her grandmother. Day before yesterday Deidre had been down on all fours giving Connor a piggyback ride, but at seventy-five—
“I’m trying to reach Brooke O’Toole?”
“That’s...me.”
“Right.” He cleared his throat and then identified himself as a deputy sheriff of Monroe County. Before she had a chance to visualize the dot that marked Monroe County on a map of Florida, he explained how a Miami-bound charter flight had gone down in the Atlantic, just off Key West. There had been no survivors, he was sorry to say, and, as next of kin, she needed to give him her okay before he could release the bodies.
Brooke didn’t hear much after no survivors. Her sister and brother-in-law had decided to end their island-hopping trip with visits to Ernest Hemingway’s favorite haunts, including Sloppy Joe’s saloon.
On Key West.
Heart pounding, Brooke squeezed her eyes shut. Before turning in for the night, she’d been online, checking her email. Wouldn’t a story like that have popped up on her search engine’s opening page?
Any minute now the deputy would realize his error and apologize for contacting the wrong Brooke O’Toole. Or she’d wake from this ghastly dream and eighteen-month-old Connor would still have his mom and dad, and she would still have her little sister, and Beth and Kent would come home tomorrow, exactly as planned.
“Ma’am? You still there?”
“Yes. Still here.”
The deputy listed all the agencies that had participated in the search—FAA, Florida Fish and Wildlife, the sheriff’s department—and had cooperated to keep their findings from the media until after next-of-kin notifications had been made.
During her years as a nurse in Virginia Commonwealth University’s shock-trauma unit, Brooke had learned that state troopers were normally assigned the sensitive task of informing relatives about tragedies. She was about to ask why the deputy had made this call instead of passing the information to the Maryland State Police when he told her that a Coast Guard diver had pulled a Ziploc bag out of the water. In it, he said, the authorities found passports, boarding passes and baggage claim tickets, a computer-generated itinerary that confirmed the Sheridans’ names on the passenger manifest...and the photograph of a young boy.
In the silence that followed, Brooke realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled. Swallowed, hard.
“It says ‘Connor, 14 months’ on the back of the picture,” the deputy added. “And it was paper-clipped to a list of people to contact in the event that...”
“In the event that something awful happened to Beth and Kent.”
“I, uh... Well, yes, ma’am. In that event.”
Brooke blinked back tears. She hadn’t realized she’d said that out loud.
“I know it isn’t much comfort,” the man said, “but we can be reasonably certain no one suffered.”
She shut her eyes. In other words, the impact had been such that they’d died instantly. Brooke leaned on a kitchen chair for support.
His voice cracked slightly as he asked for her email address. Was that because he was new at this “inform the families” job, or because of the grim nature of the task itself? “Is there anyone I can call for you, ma’am?”
“There’s only my grandmother. But I’d like to break the news to her myself.”
“Well...then...do you have a pen handy?”
Of course she had a pen handy, because her oh-so-organized sister—who’d gone to all the trouble of tucking important documents into a waterproof bag—had tied a dry-erase marker to a string and taped it to the whiteboard beside the phone. Hands trembling, Brooke uncapped it.
He rattled off his home, office and cell phone numbers. “If you have any questions...”
It seemed ludicrous to keep him on the line, but she couldn’t hang up. Not yet. Things just can’t end this way.
Brooke thought back to when she had helped Beth and Kent unload their suitcases at the terminal. Kent had reminded her where she could find Connor’s pediatrician’s number...in the polka-dot address book beside the phone. Their favorite plumber and electrician were there, as well as...Hunter’s number.
Hunter Stone was one of their emergency contacts. She would never understand
