Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

impact – while mild – sent fresh pain shooting through his injured body. He heard people running toward him now, heard someone shout, “Call nine-one-one!” and then he felt himself slipping away into darkness. He didn’t know if he was dying or merely losing consciousness, and right then he didn’t care. But whatever was happening to him, wherever his spirit might end up, he knew the universal deathscream would be there to keep him company.

And then darkness rushed in and he knew no more.

Chapter Nine

“Tell me again why we have to go to the mall?”

Maureen McGuire sat behind the wheel of the police cruiser. It was raining, not too heavily, and the windshield wipers were doing a good job of keeping the glass clear. It was overcast, almost dark enough to be twilight, and she had the headlights on. The lights might not be absolutely necessary – it wasn’t that dark – but Maureen believed in being proactive when it came to safety. When you were a cop, especially if you’d been on the job as long as she had, it was too easy to become lazy, to start cutting corners, to think that just because you’re a cop, nothing bad can happen to you. Like doctors who don’t believe they’ll ever get sick or judges who think they’ll never be found guilty of a crime. That was why she always followed the rules. She drove to the speed limit – unless it was an emergency – and she always used her turn signal, always came to a full and complete stop at intersections. So if it was even close to dark enough to turn on the headlights, that’s what she did.

Next to her, her partner said, “Because we have work to do there.”

Rauch didn’t look at Maureen as he answered, and his tone was relaxed, almost amused, as if he were enjoying some joke that she wasn’t aware of. Maureen didn’t turn to look at him, though. She always kept her eyes on the road when driving. She wanted to ask, What kind of work? but she didn’t. If Rauch wasn’t in the mood to go into detail about something, no amount of coaxing could get it out of him. Rauch liked to play things close to the vest, and while this frustrated Maureen, she’d learned to live with it during their time working together.

She frowned. Just how long had they been partners? She couldn’t remember. Not all that long, she supposed. At least, that’s what it felt like. She honestly had no idea, which was weird. Weirder still, for most of her career she’d driven a cruiser solo. Oakmont wasn’t a big city, and there wasn’t enough money in the budget to hire so many officers that they rode two to a cruiser. Maureen hadn’t ridden with another cop since she’d been a green-as-they-come rookie. So why was she now partnered with Rauch? And hadn’t they been working the night shift yesterday? Yeah, they had. So what were they doing working this afternoon, too? She’d never been assigned a day shift immediately following a night one before.

Her frown deepened as she realized she couldn’t remember going home last night. She remembered responding to a break-in call at that woman’s apartment. Her name escaped Maureen now, but she remembered what she looked like well enough, and also the layout of her place. But as to what she and Rauch had done after leaving the woman’s apartment…. She didn’t have a clue. Had she and Rauch been driving around ever since then? Again, she didn’t know, but she had a feeling that Rauch hadn’t been with her the entire time. Sometimes he was there and sometimes he wasn’t. Where he went or what he did while he was gone was yet one more thing Maureen didn’t know.

Maureen was divorced, and the two children she’d had with her ex were grown and long on their own. She’d never remarried, so if she had been out all night, there was no one in her life to notice. The thought depressed her.

They were less than a mile from the mall when they hit a red light. Maureen braked to a stop and turned to look at Rauch, intending to ask him to explain what the hell was going on, because something sure as shit was. Rauch continued looking straight ahead, but before Maureen could speak, three slits opened in Rauch’s neck. They spread wide, revealing red flesh inside, and they remained like that for a moment before closing. Maureen was revolted by Rauch’s— What were they? Gills? But she wasn’t alarmed by them. She had the feeling that she’d seen this happen before, had seen it a lot of times. She couldn’t remember when, precisely – big surprise – but she felt certain she’d witnessed the slits opening and closing before, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. And while she didn’t know for sure, couldn’t with her terrible memory, she thought she’d never asked Rauch about them, that it had never even occurred to her until now that she should ask, that something wasn’t right – was in fact terribly wrong – about her ‘partner’. But she still didn’t find the words or the will to speak. It was as if some kind of force was keeping her from thinking or talking about certain things, subjects that Rauch might not wish to address.

Rauch’s neck gills opened and closed twice more before the light turned green and Maureen remembered to remove her foot from the brake and put it down on the gas pedal. The cruiser pulled into the intersection and neither Rauch nor Maureen spoke for the next few minutes. When they drew near one of the mall’s entrances, Maureen slowed, hit the cruiser’s right turn signal, and turned into the lot. The mall’s official name was the extraordinarily pretentious Horizon’s Edge, but no one seemed to remember why it had been chosen. Almost everyone in town simply referred to it as The Mall. Whoever