Once a Hero Page 3

  “What the hell—” Billy griped as he rubbed his knee. “Why are you sitting up in the dark?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Your back bothering you?”

  Kent shook his head. “Nope,” he said, ignoring the twinge along his spine. He had grown used to it over the past few years. “That’s not the pain keeping me awake.”

  “The reporter?” Billy asked, snorting with disgust.

  He nodded.

  “I heard you brought her to the Lighthouse.” Billy dropped onto the old plaid couch across from the leather chair where Kent sat.

  “You talked to your mom?” He grinned as he thought of Marla Halliday and how she’d led Erin to the dartboard. “Did you know she was joining the class?”

  Billy shook his head. “I wish Paddy would’ve given me the heads-up he gave you about Powell.”

  “You’re lucky you have a mom who wants to be involved in what you’re doing,” Kent told him. He’d been estranged from his folks since he’d chosen to go to the police academy instead of continuing the Terlecki tradition of working the family farm in northern Michigan.

  “Mom can’t be involved in my life now,” Billy said, sinking deeper into the couch. Exhaustion blackened the skin beneath his eyes, making him look older than his twenty-six years. “You know how vice is….”

  Deep cover. Streets. Bars. Abandoned houses and back alleys. Late nights and dangerous people. Kent had loved his years in vice. That was where he had made the majority of his arrests. Erin was delusional to think he’d had to frame innocent people; he hadn’t met many innocent people during that time. Or now. Somehow he suspected she was every bit as dangerous as the criminals he’d dealt with during his stint in vice.

  She sure had it in for him for some reason, finding fault with everything he said or did.

  “How come you came home?” Kent asked.

  Not that Billy spent every night in the drug house the department had set up in the seedy area of Lakewood. The cover wasn’t so deep that the officers weren’t entitled to some downtime. Some officers even worked a regular twelve-hour shift. Billy wasn’t one of them.

  The other man yawned and flopped his head against the back of the sofa. “I wanted to get some sleep without having to keep one eye open to watch my back.”

  “I remember feeling like that,” Kent sympathized.

  “You should still feel like that,” his roommate warned him, “with that reporter out to get you. Why the hell did you okay Erin Powell getting into the CPA?”

  He sighed. “I wanted to prove to her that the department has nothing to hide.”

  “She’s not as interested in the department as she is you, Bullet,” Billy warned him. Some of the weariness left his dark eyes as he leaned forward and studied Kent. “You’re not interested in her, are you?”

  Kent choked on a laugh. “Talk about having to sleep with one eye open…”

  Not that he expected they would do much sleeping if they ever stopped fighting. Erin Powell was one passionate woman. Too bad her passion was hating him.

  “We’re talking Fatal Attraction, huh?” Billy chuckled.

  “Oh, yeah,” Kent agreed. For me. How the heck could he be attracted to a woman who obviously couldn’t stand him? Especially since he really didn’t like her much, either. But she was so damn beautiful….

  “So why the hell did you bring her to the ’house?” Billy asked again, too good an officer to give up.

  But after serving as public information officer for three years, Kent was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer. “She saw the picture you pinned to the dartboard,” he said instead.

  Billy chuckled again. “That should be a warning to her to lay off. You showed her?”

  “Your mom did.”

  The younger man sighed. “Yeah, now that my mom knows where the ’house is, there’ll be no escaping her.”

  “Your mom is great,” Kent countered, staunchly defending Marla Halliday. “And tough.” She’d had Billy when she was seventeen, and had raised him all by herself.

  “She’s not your mom,” Billy reminded him.

  That hadn’t stopped Kent from wishing he’d had someone like her in his life—someone who actually gave a damn about him. “You’re lucky.”

  His friend sighed. “Yeah, I am. Too bad you didn’t have better luck.”

  As well as not being a hero, he wasn’t a martyr, either. He refused to blame anyone else or make any excuses for what had happened to him. “We make our own luck.”

  “By letting Powell into the program, you made yourself some bad luck, my friend,” Billy warned. “You’re going to have no escape from her now.”

  It didn’t much matter where Erin went. He already had no escape from her. She was in his head…and under his skin.

  “Why’d you bring her there?” Billy persisted.

  Kent shrugged, keeping the grimace from his face as muscles tightened in his back. “I don’t know.”

  “You want to get her to change her mind about you,” the younger officer guessed correctly.

  “About the department,” Kent insisted, unwilling to admit everything.

  After all the things she’d written about him, Erin Powell should be the last woman to whom Kent was attracted. But his instincts told him there was something more to her, something she didn’t want him to know. And he’d never been able to resist a mystery. Of course, his instincts had gotten too rusty to trust, so he could be wrong. He might have just imagined the hint of vulnerability in her brown eyes.

  His roommate remarked, “Seems like her biggest problem is with you.”

  “Seems like,” he agreed.

  Billy leaned back on the sofa again and closed his eyes, almost idly asking, “So are you going to finally find out why she has a problem with you?”

  “How?” She was too stubborn to tell him.

  “You may have been desked, but you’re still one of the best cops Lakewood’s ever had. You know how,” his roommate insisted.

  “Beat a confession out of her?” Kent asked with a laugh. “That’s the kind of cop she seems to think I was.”

  “She doesn’t know a damn thing about you.”

  “No.” And she seemed to think he didn’t know a thing about her. Maybe it was time—past time, actually—that he did. He wanted to know everything there was to know about Erin Powell.

  Chapter Three

  Erin’s hand trembled as she closed it around the door handle of the editor-in-chief’s office. When she had come into the Chronicle—late again—she had found a note on her desk ordering her to see Mr. Stein immediately. He stood in front of the windows looking out over the rain-slicked city of Lakewood, his back to her. Quaint brick buildings lined the cobblestone streets, and in the distance whitecaps rose on Lake Michigan, slapping against the shoreline.

  She cleared the nervousness from her voice. “Sir? You wanted to see me?”

  “You finally made it in?” he asked, without turning toward her.

  “I was working from home, sir,” she said, hoping to pacify him with the partial truth. “I do some of my best work from home.”

  The heavyset man finally left the windows and dropped into the leather chair behind his desk. On his blotter was a printout of the article she had turned in the day before: Public Information Officer Admits Cushy Job a Made-Up Position. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I’ve been getting complaints about you.”

  So she wasn’t being called on the carpet over her tardiness this time. She winced as if she could feel the dart between her eyes. “Let me guess—Sergeant Terlecki?”

  “No, surprisingly,” Herb Stein said as he leaned back, his chair creaking in protest due to his substantial weight. “I think he’s the only one who hasn’t complained.”

  Erin’s face heated. “Then…who?”

  “Just about everyone else down at the department, and quite a lot of the general public.”

  She wasn’t surprised. She hadn�
�t been welcomed very warmly by anyone at the class or the bar afterward a few days before. But still it stung, having people dislike her. Yet she hadn’t joined the CPA to make friends; she was after the truth.

  “I had some serious doubts about hiring you,” Herb admitted. “You didn’t have much experience, going from college directly into the Peace Corps.”

  “I was a journalist with the college paper,” she reminded him. “And I wrote several freelance articles while I was in the Corps.” She’d been in South America, teaching in a remote village school and helping out at the local clinic and wherever else she had been needed. She hadn’t known then how much she’d been needed back home.

  “That bleeding heart stuff.” He dismissed the work of which she was the proudest. “I didn’t think you had it in you to be a real journalist. That’s why I’ve kept you on probation.”

  Dread filled her, but she had to know. “Are you firing me now?”

  Her boss laughed. “Hell, no. At least people are reading your byline. That’s more than I can say about some of the other staff. I hired you because I thought that even for a bleeding heart, you had potential. That you had some drive.”

  Jason was her drive. Jason and Mitchell. She had to help them. “I do.”

  “You’ve proved me right.”

  Erin uttered a sigh of relief. “You had me worried that I was losing my job.”

  “No, in fact, I like this new angle—you attending the Citizen’s Police Academy.”

  “Uh, that’s great.” She actually wasn’t that certain she’d made the right choice in joining. Terlecki wouldn’t let anyone but him answer her queries, and he never answered the most important question. Then again, she couldn’t ask him outright if he’d framed her brother to pad his arrest record. He was too smart to make any incriminating admissions.

  She was also worried about Jason. While the class met only one night a week, he hated being separated from her. Dropping the six-year-old at school every morning had become an ordeal. He claimed to be sick, and since he did have asthma and allergies, she was never certain if he was telling the truth. Her stomach tightened now with guilt over leaving him with his first-grade teacher. While the older woman had assured her that he was always fine the moment Erin left, she was concerned.

  “Did you hear me?” Herb asked, his voice sharp with impatience.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Erin said, face heating. “What were you saying?”

  Her lack of attention apparently forgiven, he grinned. “I’m going to give you your own column to report on what happens while you’re in the academy.”

  Her own column? If she truly were the ambitious reporter Kent thought her, she would be thrilled. Instead, nervous tension coursed through her. Could she handle a column, in addition to her regular coverage of the police beat and taking care of her nephew?

  “Thank you, sir,” she finally murmured, “I hope I don’t disappoint you.”

  “Just keep writing like this,” he said, slapping his hand on the copy of her last article. He chuckled with glee. “I love it.”

  “I HATE IT.”

  The chief chuckled as he settled onto the chair behind his desk. “I think the feeling’s mutual.”

  “I said I hate it,” Kent clarified as he paced the small space between the chief’s desk and the paneled office walls. “I hate the article, not her.”

  But it wasn’t just an article anymore—she had been given her own column: Powell on Patrol, which was to be like a weekly journal of her adventures in the Citizen’s Police Academy.

  “I suspect her boss and my friend the mayor had something to do with this,” the chief admitted. He and the mayor were hardly friends, more like barely civil enemies.

  Kent suspected their animosity had something to do with the chief’s wife, since the mayor had pretty much dropped any civility since her death a year ago. “Joel Standish does own the Chronicle and control Herb Stein.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think they’re twisting her arm to write this stuff. She really seems to hate you.” The chief slapped the paper against his desk. “I’d hate her, too, if I were you.” Anger flushed the older man’s face.

  Kent laughed at his even-mannered boss expressing such a sentiment. Maybe Kent didn’t have the loving family his roommate had, but the department was his family, and there was no one more loyal than a fellow officer. “That’s you.”

  “C’mon, you have to hate her,” Frank Archer insisted. “Look at how she twisted your words.”

  Kent took the proffered paper from his boss’s outstretched hand. “I read it.” He didn’t even glance at the column as he recited from memory, “‘Public information officer Sergeant Terlecki admits his cushy job at the Lakewood Police Department is a made-up position.’”

  “She did twist your words, right?” The chief leaned forward. “Because I remember you saying something pretty similar when I offered you the job.”

  “We hadn’t had a public information officer before,” Kent reminded him. The chief—and his predecessor—had always handled the press themselves. If he’d been too busy, his secretary had claimed he wasn’t available for comment.

  “But other departments that aren’t even as big as ours have public information officers to deal with the media, and we should, too,” Frank insisted. “We needed one. We needed you.”

  Kent stopped his pacing and held the man’s pale blue gaze. “You didn’t create the job because…”

  “Because you took a bullet for me?” The chief shook his head. “Son, I’d take it back if I could.”

  “The job?” He deliberately misunderstood, his lips twitching into a smile.

  “The bullet.”

  “Nobody can take the bullet out.” Not without a seventy-five percent chance of leaving him paralyzed. Those weren’t odds Kent was willing to take a risk on; as Billy had said, he wasn’t lucky.

  “Have you checked with a surgeon recently?” Chief Archer asked. “There are new medical advances all the time. You could go to the University of Michigan or the Mayo—”

  “I’m fine, really,” he assured his boss, whom he also thought of as a friend. Despite Kent’s insistence, he knew that Frank Archer would always feel guilty that Kent had gotten hurt while protecting him.

  “You’re bored out of your mind in this job,” the chief stated.

  Apparently Kent hadn’t done very well hiding his dissatisfaction. He tapped a finger against the newspaper he held. “Erin Powell keeps things interesting.”

  The chief’s pale eyes narrowed. “Not interesting enough, I suspect. I know you, Kent. I know you’d rather be back in the field.”

  “So put me back in the field,” Kent snapped, tired of hiding his feelings to spare others’ guilt.

  Betraying his inner torment, the chief closed his eyes and shook his head. “God, I wish I could, Kent, but I can’t, not without medical clearance.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kent said, as his own guilt coursed through him. He hadn’t wanted to make the chief feel worse than he already did. “I know you can’t.” With the bullet so close to his spine, he was too much of a liability.

  Even without surgery, there was a risk of paralysis from scar tissue pressing on nerves or the bullet moving and irrevocably damaging his spinal cord. It wouldn’t be fair to his fellow officers—the ones he might need to back up—or to the civilians he might need to protect if he was on the job. Erin had been exactly right the other night when she’d claimed that his badge was just for show.

  The chief sighed, then forced a smile. “At least Erin Powell keeps you from being bored senseless in your cushy job.”

  “That she does.” Kent gripped the paper tighter and glanced down at the picture of her next to the byline of her new column. While he didn’t betray it to his boss, anger gripped him. He wanted to wring her pretty little neck. She had deliberately twisted every damn word he’d spoken to her the other night.

  “You should tell her,” the chief advised.

  “How I ca
me by my nickname?” Kent shook his head. “No, we agreed to keep that from the public.”

  “Back then. Three years ago. Keeping it secret was your first decision as public information officer.” The chief’s eyes filled with pride. “You were on your way to surgery at the time.”

  The surgery hadn’t removed the bullet, though the doctors still claimed they had saved his life. But Kent couldn’t do his job anymore, so he had no life. At least not the life he used to have—the one he wanted.

  “It was a good decision,” Kent insisted. Keeping the attempt on the chief’s life quiet had been a good decision, but maybe he should have had the bullet taken out, and risked paralysis.

  “You really don’t want the public to make you a hero,” the chief mused, shaking his head.

  “Not when someone else has to be the villain.”

  “But the woman shot you!” The older man’s voice shook with emotion.

  “She was trying to shoot you,” Kent reminded him. “I think we both agree that Mrs. Ludlowe paid for what she did. It wouldn’t be fair to open up all that pain again.” And reporters like Erin Powell would be only too happy to do that. He tossed the paper onto the chief’s cluttered desk.

  Frank leaned back in his chair and sighed, then grabbed the paper and crumpled it up. “This is not fair to you. You’re taking another bullet that isn’t meant for you.”

  Kent grinned. “Oh, I have a feeling this bullet is meant only for me.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. It’s past time I learned.” He was going to take Billy’s advice, polish up his rusty investigative skills and finally figure out what Erin Powell’s problem was with him.

  “Be careful, Kent,” the chief advised. “You haven’t been out in the field for a while.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He waved dismissively and headed for the door. “I’ve been dodging Erin Powell’s bullets for a year now.”