“You were screaming.”
Holding up a hand, she waved him off. Her mind was starting to clear. It always took a second or so. Even reaching for her gun was a mistake; she’d kept her weapons locked away ever since Jeremy had arrived home from the hospital twenty years earlier. Letting out a long, slow breath, she tried to clear her mind. “Bad dream.”
“Mom, this is, like, the fifth one in a month.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Nodding, feeling foolish, she wondered what the hell was wrong with her. Lately, she’d been having nightmares—bizarre, horrid dreams where she awoke with her heart thundering. In some cases, segments of the dreams were from old cases she’d worked. Other times, she was a young woman, with little kids. In some cases, Joe was dying in her arms, blood pouring from a wound she couldn’t locate, blood she couldn’t staunch.
She wondered if she should see a shrink but quickly decided against it. With Santana’s ultimatum looming, and after witnessing the attack on Grayson, she was just stressed.
Lord knew she’d seen enough horror in her job to create the sick images that crawled through her brain at night. Coupled with what she’d seen, she’d physically and mentally experienced her own terror at the hands of a madman.
If she had bad dreams, she’d earned every last one of them. Drawing her legs up around her, she wrapped her arms around her knees. She was still cold, shivering inside; she realized she’d kicked her covers off sometime during the restless night.
“You’re okay?” Jeremy asked from the doorway.
“Yeah.” Pushing her hair from her eyes, she glanced at the clock: 3:37. Inwardly, she groaned when she thought of how soon she’d have to get up. Clicking on the bedside light, as her eyes grew accustomed to the illumination, she saw that her son’s hair was mussed, his clothes disheveled. “I, um, I don’t suppose I want to know where you’ve been.”
“Don’t think so. No.”
She wanted to argue, but it was too late, and it would only be one more heated, angry discussion that went nowhere.
No doubt he’d been with Heidi until all hours of the morning. He knew where she stood about sex, condoms, his future, Heidi’s . . . bringing it up now would only exacerbate an already prickly situation.
“Nothing good happens after midnight,” she reminded him.
“You’re wrong, Mom, and you know it.”
“Okay, okay.” Who was she to argue the point when she and Santana had made love into the wee hours of the morning so recently? “Not a discussion for the middle of the night.”
“You’re right.” Hand on the doorknob, he started to turn away.
“Jer?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Mom. Good night.” He closed the door softly and she knew he was lying. As she slapped off the light and the darkness crept in, she knew it wasn’t a good night, not a good night at all.
As Christmas celebrations went, this had been the worst ever, Pescoli thought, hanging up her coat on the hook near the door of her office. It didn’t even seem like the holiday. The last twenty-four hours since the attack on Grayson had been a disaster that wouldn’t end. Last night, she’d hung out with her kids for a while, talked to Santana on the phone for nearly an hour, then flopped onto her bed long after midnight, though she hadn’t slept much, the nightmare destroying whatever chance of getting the shut-eye she needed. She’d barely caught two hours of sleep, and this morning her eyes felt gritty and red, as if she were hungover. So far, there didn’t seem to be enough Visine on the planet to help.
She made her way into the near-empty lunch area where she poured herself a cup of coffee, emptying the glass carafe in the process as she watched the dregs slide into her mug. Sometimes, when she grabbed the last cup in the pot, she’d take the time to brew more. Not today. Not when Dan Grayson was lying near death in a Missoula hospital.
Sipping from her mug, hoping the coffee had enough caffeine in it to give her system the jump start it needed, she walked down the short hallway, nodding at a couple of deputies sauntering in the opposite direction, their conversation hushed.
The entire building seemed to have turned down the volume a bit—no loud jokes, cackling laughter, or rattle of chains as a suspect, handcuffed and shackled, was herded through the department. Cell phones still rang, but they seemed quieter, and the conversation, if there was any, was muted.
Had it been just a little over a day since she’d driven around the bend in Grayson’s lane and seen him hit? God, it seemed like a lifetime as she passed Grayson’s darkened office and noticed Sturgis’s empty dog bed in the corner. Her heart twisted and her jaw tightened as she remembered the old dog taking off like a black bullet, streaking after the assassin. “Shit,” she said and wished to hell she had a cigarette.
“Hey!” Alvarez called from inside her office and Pescoli paused at the doorway. “Brewster’s on the warpath.”
“When isn’t he?” Whether he was the acting sheriff or not, Cort Brewster was a prick, at least in Pescoli’s biased opinion. “And by the way, that’s not PC.”
“Nothing is anymore.”
“You got that right. So what’s up?”
“Have you heard that Kathryn Samuels-Piquard is missing?”