Strawberry Wine

  Strawberry Wine

  By E. Jamie

  Strawberry Wine

  ISBN 978-1-936110-47-6

  Copyright © December 2009, E. Jamie

  Cover art by Jordyn Tracy © December 2009

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or used fictitiously. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Sugar and Spice Press

  North Carolina, USA

  www.sugarnspicepress.com

  Chapter One

  It was a good day, Laura thought, blinking the sweat out of her eyes. Though, judging by the sting on her forehead, she wasn’t entirely convinced it was just sweat.

  She pushed her knee a little harder into the squirming man’s back, snapping the handcuffs shut with a final, satisfying click. Pulling him to his feet with her, she ignored the barrage of obscenities he shouted at her over his shoulder and pushed the two-hundred pound man up against her squad car.

  “Hey. Don’t you know there’s a lady present?” Laura asked and smacked the back of his head before pulling open the door to the backseat.

  “Some might call that police brutality,” Officer Karl Matthews pointed out as he came out of the car parked behind her.

  “That’s right!” Terry Moave exclaimed, struggling against Laura’s repeated attempts to shove him into the back of the car. “I’ll sue. I’ll sue the whole goddamn NYPD. Starting with you, you goddamned slut!”

  Karl tucked the lollipop in his mouth over to the left side of his cheek and helped Laura push the drug dealer into the car. “You know the Sarge is gonna kick your ass for not waiting for backup.”

  “No, he’s gonna kiss my ass for bringing in Terry here.” Laura lowered her head to give the criminal a cheeky grin. “You know, you just might make me the Sarge’s favorite.”

  “Up yours!”

  Laura sighed and straightened, turning toward her friend and fellow officer. “I don’t think he likes me.”

  Karl lifted his hand to her forehead, and she wasn’t surprised to see the crimson stain on his fingers.

  “Terry here likes it rough,” Laura explained with a shrug. “It’s not that bad.”

  Her best friend shook his head. “Right. It never is for you, huh? Should I even bother telling you to get this stitched up?” His voice was tinged with a beat of sadness, and Laura’s stomach tightened in apprehension.

  She forced her friend off the uncomfortable path with a bright smile. “Let’s get Terry here back to the station. Shall we?” She leaned back down to face Terry in the car. “Then you can explain about all the teddy bears filled with cocaine.” Laura slammed the door shut and went to explain her findings to the three of her fellow officers who had arrived with Karl.

  ****

  Terry was a talkative sort, only too eager to toss out names of bigger criminals than his petty self to save his own behind.

  For a price, of course.

  He smiled at Laura across the table in the interrogation room, and she had to grit her teeth to resist the urge to lean across the table and sock him in his bulbous nose.

  “We’ll have to get the okay from the Sarge on that,” Karl pointed out, tearing the wrapper off a lime-flavored lollipop and popping it in his mouth.

  “I can wait,” Terry tossed back.

  “Sure. You can wait here with me, or we can stick you in a nice comfy holding cell,” Laura said.

  “Choose wisely,” Karl warned. “She has a way of…um…loosening tongues.”

  Terry rolled his eyes. “That supposed to scare me? Bet she doesn’t weigh one thirty soaking wet.”

  “Took you down, didn’t I?” Laura countered with an arched light brown eyebrow.

  He glared at her. “I’ll wait here.”

  Karl pushed back his chair and went to relay Terry’s conditions to Sergeant McKinney.

  “Met cops like you before,” Terry said to Laura when they were left alone.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Stupid broads who think they can be tough like us guys. Ain’t right. Biology don’t lie. Only way you could get the drop on me was to lie, to trick me into thinking you were on the level, wanting to work for my club.”

  “Ah, right, while you are the model of integrity. That it?” Laura asked with a snort.

  “Just sayin’. One on one, man to…well…you, it’d be a different story. Just one use for you bitches. That’s your problem, all of ya. Just need to be poked on a regular basis to get out all that aggression. Put you in a better mood.”

  Laura propped her chin on her fists, listening with feigned intense concentration. It was nothing she hadn’t heard before. She rested her elbows on the long black table. “Please, tell me more. Your views on feminism are just fascinating, Terry. Did your daddy teach you that crap?”

  He smiled at her. “This where you try all that psychology shit?”

  “Wow, multisyllables. I’m impressed.”

  “What about you, huh? Daddy didn’t pay you enough attention, so you thought you’d grow a pair by being a cop?”

  Laura stood up and got some water from the cooler next to the door.

  “Get me some too, would ya?”

  She downed the cool water from the cone-shaped paper cup in one long gulp. “Sorry. Not your maid. Feminism and all that, ya know?”

  “Oh, I got it now. Daddy liked to kick Momma around and she took it, right? Never gonna be like her, right?” Terry asked.

  Laura crumpled the paper cup so tightly her short nails pressed into the skin of her palm. She tossed it into the garbage can and fought a flicker of fury that heated her belly; she forced her expression back to its nonchalant mask before sitting back in her seat.

  ****

  Her mother must have smelled Caleb on her skin, because her eyes went dark and angry when Laura came into the house that had never been a home. When she passed her on the way to her room, Karen blocked her way and asked Laura where she'd been. Her stomach fluttered with panic and she stammered, “N...nowhere. T...t...took the long way h...home.” Only Caleb knew that she stammered when she was frightened. And one of the few things that frightened Laura was her mother.

  Karen Thatcher sniffed the air around her daughter and then backhanded the fifteen-year-old girl into the wall. “Whore!” Laura heard through a haze of pain. She struggled to her feet, only to have her mother grab her by her blonde hair and press her face against the pale yellow wall. “Rolling around in the gutter, huh? Spreading your legs already? You stupid whore!”

  Another smack and Laura fell face first into a stack of old magazines in the corner of the room. The carpet smelled of dirt and beer.

  “Was it that McKinney boy? Was it?”her mother asked, towering over Laura as the girl blinked back sweat, tears and hatred.

  “Nah. It was Santa Claus,” she joked through a mouthful of blood. That was another thing she didn’t understand about herself. She could be trembling with fear, her blood ice cold in her veins, and yet she would goad her mother further. She was rewarded with another slap and a kick to the gut with a thankfully bare foot for fun.

  “Don't you mock me, you little slut.” And on it went for about twenty minutes.

  When Karen's parental lecture was finally concluded, she fell into the chair in front of the TV with only four channels because nobody paid the cable bill.

  Laura dropped onto her bed, every muscle in agony, her face on fire, and cried herself to sleep.

  ****

  Word came back from the D.A.’s office that they’d agreed to the deal. Laura tried to tell herself that the important person was whoever Terry was working for, not Terry himself. She was used to the way things worked by now, but it still pissed her off that th
e drug dealer would be getting no more than a slap on the wrist just because he knew how to work the system to his benefit.

  “I can take it from here if you want to get a start on writing up your report,” Karl offered.

  Normally, she’d rather poke her eyes out than have to deal with paperwork, but faced with the other option of dealing with Terry’s smugness, Laura threw the pen down and got up out of her seat and stormed out.

  “Nice talking to ya, Officer,” Terry called out cheerfully.

  She forced herself not to turn around but gave into the urge to slam the door on her way out.

  Laura had just settled into her seat behind her desk when Sergeant McKinney popped his head out of his office and called out to her.

  “Thatcher?”

  It was a sympathetic “Thatcher” this time. She was well attuned to the different variations of her name her boss used and what each was a prelude to.

  She closed the door to his office and stood with her arms crossed over her chest, glaring at him.

  The old man looked at her with tired blue eyes. “I know. It sucks. You just have to look at the big picture here.”

  “No. You have to look at the big picture. I get to stand here and fume over the fact that we are out there risking our asses every damned day to bring scum like Terry Moave in just so the D.A. can let him out in…. Are they even giving him any time at all, or will he be back on the street by dinner?”

  “Three months,” William McKinney replied, anger evident behind his resignation.

  Laura rolled her eyes. “Well, thank goodness for small mercies, I guess.”

  “Look, the paperwork can wait until tomorrow. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”

  She nodded, her eyes falling for a moment on the picture propped on his desk. The back was to her, but she knew it was of his two sons, Mike and Caleb, as youngsters.

  Her heart always moved into her throat when she remembered his sons.

  There was Mike, the youngest, whom she had loved but not nearly enough. Now he was dead, and she could never make amends.

  And there was Caleb, whom she’d loved too much, and though he was still alive, she knew she could never make amends with him either.

  “Yeah.” Laura nodded, taking a deep, shaky breath. “I think I will.”

  She turned to go, and he called out to her again when she pulled open the door.

  “One more thing. You go after a suspect again without backup, I will personally kick your ass off the force. Understood?” he growled at her.

  “Yes, sir.” She loved the old man. He was the closest thing she had to a father and had given her a chance when no one else would have, when a lesser man might let her wallow in her grief and die like she had wanted to. She shouldn’t give him such a hard time, considering she had killed his son.

  Laura drove home to her apartment in a small four-story walkup in The Bronx. She could afford something a little better, but she felt that she should stay where she could do the most good. Penance for her sins, maybe, she thought, tossing the keys on her vanity table in the hallway.

  She kicked off her shoes and made her way in her black socks across the white, painted wood floor to the kitchen to switch on the coffeemaker before turning towards her bedroom.

  Laura went to her closet and reached up on the shelf to pull down the small gray metal box.

  His dog tags were in there, from his tour in Iraq four years ago, along with his badge. She didn’t look at them often because the loss still made her ache with a power that took her breath away.

  Mike hadn’t really ever wanted to be a cop. He was a gentle soul, but trapped by the McKinney legacy, he’d felt it was the only way to gain his father’s approval and to live up to the example set by the older brother he adored.

  She remembered when she’d seen Mike again after breaking Caleb’s heart. After leaving him because she was too much of a coward to tell him what she had done. She’d been on the force for a few years, and after two suspensions, the last because she’d punched the ever living snot out of a male fellow officer she’d caught smacking his wife around in the parking lot, Laura was a hair’s breadth away from being kicked off the force.

  The solution? Spend a year at the police academy in Philadelphia training new recruits. Her boss at the time, a Sergeant Moss, told her she was being saved because she was one of the best.

  ****

  Sometimes, being the best sucked lemons.

  Laura was writing some notes in yellow chalk on the wide green board when the door swung open and rushed footsteps made their way towards her. Latecomers.

  “You’d better have a damned good excuse. It doesn't pay to get on my bad side, as you should know by—” The words stuck in her throat when she turned to give the late student hell. She wondered if she looked as pale as he did.

  “Laura?” he asked, his voice a shocked croak.

  The other students turned to look at the new recruit with growing interest.

  She gripped the edges of the podium to keep from falling when her knees buckled. “Good God,” Laura murmured. Then, remembering she had a class to teach, she licked her lips and straightened her spine, forcing her eyes away from Caleb McKinney's brother. “We'll pick this back up in a minute. Can I see you outside?” She didn’t look at Mike but knew that he was following her out into the hallway.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Laura demanded.

  He was taller now. How old was he? Nineteen? No. Twenty. His birthday was in May. He was broader than Caleb had been when he was around the same age but had the same brown hair. His eyes, though, were brown like his mother Caroline’s, whereas Caleb had inherited his father’s blue eyes.

  Caleb... The name sliced through her with lethal ferocity, and Laura had to hold onto the wall. Her nails scraped a bit of the old pale green paint off.

  “Where have you been? God, Laura. Does Caleb know where—” His eyes roamed over her in shock, like he couldn’t believe she was standing before him.

  “No! And you're gonna shut your damned mouth about it, all right?” she snapped.

  Mike jerked back, unprepared for the violence in her tone. “Laura, I can't just—”

  “What are you doing here? Why aren't you in New York?” she asked, thinking he would surely want to be at the same police academy as his brother.

  “I wanted to learn to be a cop without having Caleb’s example held up to me all the time. Being at the same school he graduated from would have made that impossible," Mike explained, his eyes full of questions. “You know he graduated early? He's in his second year of—”

  Laura wanted to know. Wanted to know everything. Every single minute Caleb McKinney had spent apart from her. But she cut Mike off before he could continue. Down that road lay insanity.

  “I want you out of my class.” She poked his chest with her forefinger. A gesture she remembered used to piss him off when she'd do it to tease him. They both remembered. Mike narrowed his eyes, and right then, he looked too much like Caleb and Laura wanted to cry.

  “First of all, I didn't know it was your class. My sheet says Tracey on it.” He showed her the admissions form.

  “Mrs Monti is blind as a bat. Her days are numbered,” Laura explained, trying to remember to breathe.

  “Why, Laura? Why the hell did you just leave like that? Do you have any idea what that did to Caleb? You wrecked him. Completely wr—”

  Laura couldn’t look at him anymore. “I'll get you transferred to Hatfield's class. Go down to Mrs Monti—”

  “Like hell,” Mike snapped, and now it was Laura who jerked in surprise.

  She'd seen him depressed, cheerful, surly, but she didn’t remember ever seeing him well and truly angry. Like now.

  “You owe me some answers, for my brother's sake. What the hell happened that you had to ditch him without so much as a goodbye?”

  “I left a note,” she replied, knowing how pathetic and weak that sounded.

  “Caleb never mentio
ned a note. But it must not have been very clear, because he's spent the past five years wondering what the hell he did to make you dump him like a sack of garbage—”

  “Stop it! God, just stop!” Laura pleaded, wrapping her arms around herself.

  Mike's eyes softened, and he shook his head. “We have to talk about this, Laura. I'm not gonna let you ignore me. If you transfer me, I'm getting on the phone to Caleb right now and telling him where you are, got it?”

  Her eyes widened. “You can't!”

  “We'll get something to eat after class. How's that?”

  “It's not a good idea for me to get too chummy with my students.” For once, she was more than happy to follow the rules.

  “Fine. We'll go some place out of town,”