A Bitch Called Hope Read Online Free Page A

not to endanger herself or her fellow officers. What she did: ran in a feint: left, right, trying to get to Tommy.
    Doran, her partner, shouted. Stepped out from cover, guns blazing, doing his best to draw fire away from her.
    The shooter hit him in the side of the head with a forty-four.
    Before they fired her, Lennox got one month paid leave. And a good man and his widow on her conscience for the rest of her life.
    Aurora squeezed Lennox’s fingers until her rings bit into the flesh of Lennox’s hand. “They think I killed him,” she said in a low voice.
    “Don’t be silly.”
    Lennox followed Aurora’s sight line catty-corner across the room to Bill’s wife, Delia. She looked very pale and thin sitting on the sofa wedged between two men, one dark, one fair. Dan and Scott Pike. Dan all grown up. More than grown-up, her thirty-eight years plus four made him forty-two. It looked good on him. The blond one must be Scott. Scott had been beneath notice, a year younger than Lennox and a big baby. Now look at him nursing a large glass of scotch.
    Lennox heard noise coming from the direction of the kitchen. Trouble. A big cop marched into the room with a backpack, a crying woman trailing, her hand still clinging to one of the backpack straps. She was young and dressed in a caterer’s uniform. Just by entering the room she sucked up all the attention; she was that breathtakingly gorgeous.
    “It’s not what you think,” she told the cop. Over and over.
    A redheaded waiter hovered nearby. The way he watched the girl, Lennox pegged him for the boyfriend.
    “What’s going on?” Aurora half-lifted from her seat to get a better look.
    Lennox pulled her back and shushed her.
    The cop set the backpack on the interview table. “Sir, you need to look at this,” he said to Sloane.
    Sloane dumped out the contents. He fished out a banded stack of bills from under a rolled-up pair of jeans and held the bills in front of the girl.
    “Bill gave it to me,” the girl said in a voice loud enough that people within twenty feet of the table could hear.
    “Poor Delia,” Aurora said in a voice that wasn’t altogether surprised.
    Lennox had thought Bill was a nice dad just like her nice dad. Another childhood illusion shot to hell.
    All the color drained from the boyfriend’s face. His freckles stood out in big blotches.
    “I didn’t do anything wrong,” the girl said.
    “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Sloane told the girl. The cop who’d discovered the backpack led the girl past all the guests out the front door. The room went completely silent, but Lennox could feel the buzz. The girl and the money: everyone in that room telling a story to themselves about what it meant. Speculation: it’s what we humans do.
    Lennox heard a car engine come to life. The crunch of gravel on the drive as the cop drove away to headquarters with the girl.
    One of the guests, stick thin and elderly, left his chair and went over to Delia.
    In his big cop voice, Sloane told the man to sit down, but the old dude wasn’t having it.
    “I’m Delia’s doctor,” the thin man said. “She’s been through a terrible shock.”
    Tommy re-entered the living room. Sloane jerked his head in the doctor’s direction. Their conversation was too quiet for Lennox to pick up.
    Tommy turned to the guests, his gaze panning the room. He cleared his throat. “I think we have everything for now, folks,” he said. “So thank you for your cooperation. You can go home, but it may be that we’ll need to contact you again.”
    Sloane began shepherding the guests from the living room. Tommy came over to Aurora, just as she and Lennox had stood up to leave. He introduced himself.
    “If you would stay a little while longer, ma’am. I want to go over your statement with you,” he said.
    “Am I in trouble?” Aurora said in a frightened voice.
    “No, ma’am. You could bring your daughter with you if that would you make you feel more comfortable.” He