Chapter Six
Shauna met Jo during lunch. “How was the first half of your day?” she asked, sitting with her sandwich and soda.
“Intense.” Jo moved her tray over to give her room.
“Gill said you’re a pretty good shot.”
Jo couldn’t stop her eyes from searching the man out in the crowd. He sat with a few instructors.
“Did he?”
“Hey, that’s high praise, coming from him.”
“He’s an intense guy.” Gill took that moment to feel the weight of her stare. He met her eyes and didn’t flinch.
Shauna glanced over her shoulder and back. “Well, look at that.”
From across the room, Gill appeared to laugh before moving his attention to the people he was with.
“Look at what?” Jo picked up her sandwich and attempted to focus.
“He’s single,” Shauna said, a smirk covering her face.
“Who’s single?”
“Gill . . .”
Jo felt her face flush. “Did I ask?”
“Your eyes did.”
So did the rest of her, but Jo kept that to herself. “Not interested,” she said.
“Liar! But I’ll let it go. We haven’t had a chance to really talk since last fall. How is everything in River Bend?”
Jo was happy to change the subject. “Quiet.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“Considering all the excitement in the past couple years, yeah. It’s also a little unnerving.”
Shauna shifted in her seat. “I don’t like sitting idle either. A place like River Bend would grow cobwebs on my feet in no time.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m here. My badge feels like a target or a noose.” The words escaped her mouth before she could retract them.
“Target I get . . . but noose?”
Jo wasn’t one to really talk about her emotional stress on the job, but if there was anyone who might understand, it was someone who carried a badge of her own. “Some kids inherit their family business . . . auto shops, plumbers . . . even a restaurant. I somehow managed to inherit a badge. Not the path I thought I’d find myself.”
“You don’t like it.”
Jo gave up on her lunch, pushed it aside. “I’d like it more if it wasn’t such a marriage to an entire town. I’m more of a play the field woman, commitment phobic. Watching out over the same street, the same neighbors week after week, year after year, makes me feel old.”
Shauna shrugged. “Then why do it?”
Jo thought of the flag that hung over her fireplace. The one that had been draped over her father’s casket at his funeral. “I need to finish what I started.”
“What am I missing, Jo?”
“This summer will be the ten-year anniversary of my father’s death.”
“And?”
Instead of coming out and telling Agent Burton every thought, every fear . . . Jo asked, “How many men or women in uniform ‘accidentally’ shoot themselves with their own weapons?”
Shauna laughed as if it was a joke, but then her face lost her smile. “Wait, didn’t the investigating officers determine your father accidentally shot himself?”
“That’s what the report said.” Jo left her thoughts open.
“You don’t believe it.”
“My father was a smart cop . . . an avid hunter, and a man who respected his weapons more than any marksman here. I believe my father accidentally killed himself about as much as I believe you can out arm wrestle your partner.” Jo’s eyes moved to where Gill had been a few moments before.
He wasn’t there now.
“So you became a cop to get answers.”
Jo set both arms on the table and leaned forward. “I became a cop because it was what my father would have wanted. I followed his steps in River Bend to find the truth.”
“And what have you found after all these years?”
She released a painful sigh. “That my father led a very boring and unfulfilling life. The only dirt on the man was what I created when I was a teenager.”
“Sounds depressing,” Shauna said.
“Sounds like bull. My father was a good-looking guy. More than one single woman in town tried to get his attention that I remember, but he didn’t bite. Not that I found out about.”
“Maybe he went out of town for that part of his life.”
Yeah, she’d thought about that more than once. Even Waterville didn’t bring up any hits when she’d asked around.
“Where do you go when you want to let loose?”
Once again Jo found her gaze rolling over the room in search of Viking Man. “Anywhere but River Bend.”
“Seems to me you need to start looking in Anywhere, USA, instead of River Bend.”
Jo glanced at her watch when the other students started to get up and clear their lunch trays.
“Well, this is about as far from River Bend as I can get without leaving the country.”
They both stood and moved their half-eaten lunches to the garbage.
“I’d be happy to look over the reports on your father’s death. Not sure if I can help, but I’m willing.”
Jo smiled. “I’d like that.”
Barefoot, on mats, in sweatpants was only attractive if you were kicking ass . . . which Jo was not.
She’d always considered herself competent in hand-to-hand combat . . . or at the very least, able to take a perpetrator down despite her size and weight. But for every move in her cop’s toolbox, Shauna had one of equal or greater value that neutralized Jo’s efforts. While Shauna worked with Jo and a handful of other female classmates, Gill knocked around several of the men in an effort to show them their weaknesses and where they could grow.
Then they switched.
“And this is where I get my ass handed to me,” Jo said under her breath.
It wasn’t that Gill smirked when he approached . . . wait, yeah, that was exactly the expression on his face. An I’m going to show you who the strong one is, babe look.
Jo was teamed up with a half dozen women; none reached the height of Gill, and only one competed with his girth. And Bess didn’t look like she spent all her time at the gym. Big boned was the polite term that would be tossed around River Bend.
From the east side of the room someone rolled in a cart full of replica weapons and started dropping sets off with each instructor.
Gill addressed their group as the weapons were passed out. “Chances are you’ll have a weapon on you, and your opponent will know it. So for the purpose of these exercises, we’re going to increase your chances of overtaking your opponent’s weapons or ensuring yours stay with you.”
Gill glanced up, met Jo’s eyes. “JoAnne?” He motioned her forward.
“Jo is fine.”
“Great . . . take a weapon, Jo.”
She grasped a purple mock handgun similar to hers and turned toward Gill.
“Some of these tactics you’ve seen before, some you’ve practiced, but my guess is you haven’t spent a lot of time on mats perfecting your skills like you did when you were training to carry a badge.” Gill kept talking. “It’s one of the things that separate this department from yours.”
Jo stood beside Gill, waiting for him to finish.
“Jo, you work in a small town, right?”
“That’s right.”
“When was the last time someone went for your gun?”
She thought about the scuffle in Josie’s bar and shook it off. “I can’t say anyone has.” Saying that out loud made her realize how inept she was.
“All right then . . . let’s begin.”
Three times Gill had her point the gun at him at point-blank range, three times he disarmed her before she could blink and had the gun on her. Each time he took her weapon away, he did it differently, from several angles and positions. The fourth time, he had her gun, and her pinned to the ground.
“In tiny, little pieces, Anne!” he said so only she could hear.
He stood, held out a hand for her to take.
“Now let’s slow all that down and practice,” Gill addressed the class.
Jo limped off the base hours later with the need for an ice pack and a shot of anything, as long as it was strong.
Gill sat beside Shauna at a bar not far off base.
“So, Sheriff Ward?” Gill opened the conversation over a beer.
Shauna glanced at her watch, huffed out a laugh. “Less than two minutes, Clausen. Not bad.”
He twisted his frame on the supersmall bar stool and glared. “What?”
“She’s single.”
“Who?”
“Jo. Sheriff Ward. Keep up!” Shauna tilted her glass back with a grin. “Go on . . . you want to know something about Jo?”
Right. He wanted to know something about the mirage that shimmered out of his weekend and walked into his week. “What’s her story?”
Shauna studied the inside of her glass. “I already told you. River Bend’s sheriff, had a steady head when I was there investigating the disappearance of the girl. We chat once in a while.” A look of concern crossed his partner’s face before she took another drink.
“And?”
She shook her head. “I think she’s bored in that small town. Probably ready to find something new to keep her in law enforcement.”
He and Shauna hadn’t been partners for very long. In fact, he’d moved to Eugene to help the West Coast arm of missing persons a few months after the Hope Bartlett case. He knew where River Bend was on a map, but he’d never been there.
“She grew up there, right?”
“Yeah, her dad was the sheriff before her.”
“Was?”
Shauna lifted both hands and made quotation marks in the air. “‘Accidentally’ shot himself ten years ago. Jo joined the academy and the town voted her in as soon as they were able.”
“She’s a little young to be the sheriff.”
“Not for River Bend. They adore her.”
He could see why. Honey brown hair, snarky grin, with enough spice under her skin to make him think about her long after she’d left his bed. He knew when he pulled her into his room it would be a onetime thing. But when she’d been gone in the morning, he’d craved.
Gill never craved.
Lost in his thoughts, he felt his partner’s stare and met it.
“I have her cell number.”
So did he; he pilfered it off her paperwork.
“She’s single,” Shauna said again.
“I don’t remember asking.”
Shauna laughed and turned back around in her chair. “She’s a smart cop. Level headed . . . too good for where she lives, if you ask me.”
“You think this week is an exercise to see if she’s ready for something else?”
“I think there are a couple of things eating at Jo, one of which is her desire to move on to something bigger than Nowhere, Oregon.”
Gill waited for Shauna to elaborate.
Only his partner took another pull on her beer and didn’t.
“What would the other thing—”
She interrupted him. “If I thought you were interested in Jo for professional reasons, I’d tell ya, but since I think this is a boy girl thing . . . I’m going to play the gender loyalty card and suggest you call and ask her yourself.”
Shauna gave a sideways glance and a smirk.
“When’s that divorce of yours final?” he asked, knowing full well she was in the middle of trying to keep her retirement she’d managed to build in the time she’d been an agent. Her soon-to-be ex worked in security but wasn’t a Fed. His benefit plan for old age was nothing compared to hers.
“Not soon enough.”
It was Gill’s turn to smirk. “I’ll remember to play the ‘gender loyalty’ card when it is.”
“Touché.”