Stand Down Read Online Free Page B

it! What on earth are you waiting for? Go now!”
    But I had made a believer of the poor guy. He waited until I stepped on board before pushing the DOWN button. By the time we hit the ground level, Barbara was out of her sequined heels. Holding them in one hand and a tiny beaded clutch in the other, she sprinted out of the elevator and left me in the dust as she pushed through the crush of ­people waiting for the long-­delayed elevator.
    I caught up with Barbara only because she was stopped short by a uniformed cop trying to maintain a perimeter around the crash site. “She’s with me,” I told him, holding up my badge. “Let her through.”
    We reached the wreckage while firefighters were still maneuvering the jaws of life into position. Despite protests from more than one first responder, Barbara shoved Mel out of the way. “Don’t you die on me, you bastard!” she yelled at Harry, snatching his hand from Mel’s. Bad as things were, Harry focused his eyes on Barbara’s face and favored her with a tiny grin.
    â€œDo my best,” he whispered. “I’ll do my best.”
    Believe me, the relationship between Harry I. Ball and the reformed punk rocker, Barbara Galvin, had nothing to do with an office romance. It was more like a love/hate, father/daughter kind of thing.
    At that point, one of the firefighters simply picked Barbara up and carried her away from the wreckage, bringing her over to where Mel and I had taken refuge on a piece of sidewalk slick with shattered glass. “Keep her here and get her shoes back on,” the man growled at us. “We need this woman out of our way!”
    Another firefighter appeared behind him. “Okay,” he said. “We’ve got permission to land the chopper on top of KOMO.”
    The snarl of traffic, growing worse by the minute, made transporting Harry to a hospital by ambulance a nonstarter. The building for the local ABC affiliate, complete with a helipad on its roof, was almost directly across the street. In moments, they had Harry out of the crushed vehicle and onto a gurney, rolling him across the street and toward the building to the helipad. Once at Harborview Hospital, a team of the ER docs tried valiantly to save his legs. It didn’t work. His legs were gone, and soon, so was everything else, S.H.I.T included.
    Within weeks of Ross Connors’s funeral and while Harry was still in the hospital, the governor—­the one from the “other side of the aisle”—­had appointed a new attorney general, whose first order of business was to disband Special Homicide altogether. Suddenly we were all out of a job. Well, not all of us. Mel was one of the younger ones, and she’d already decided to make the move to Bellingham before the axe fell. But the rest of us—­the old duffers—­were out of luck. For right now, I was keeping busy wrangling construction projects. What I’d do later on when all the plaster dust settled was something I mostly avoided contemplating.
    I found a parking place on Cherry and trudged half a block in the wrong direction to find the applicable pay station, grumbling to myself the whole way about the loss of old-­fashioned parking meters. They might have eaten every bit of change out of your pocket in the blink of an eye, but at least they were right there by your car. You didn’t have to go searching for them.
    I was back on Boren and about to walk through the automatic doors into the lobby, when Harry hailed me by name. Turning, I saw his wheelchair parked some fifty feet away from the door under a bus-­stop-­like shelter designed to keep smokers away from the building and out of the rain, at least, if not out of the cold. I had wheeled him up there more than once, so he could have a smoke.
    Coming closer, I saw that Harry wasn’t alone. Standing nearby was Marge Herndon herself, the hoyden who had looked after me during my