Tuesday Tales From the Word CARRY

Welcome to this week’s Tuesday Tales. Winter has arrived with a vengeance. This week, we have an as yet untitled story. It’s a Romance/suspense. Our word prompt this week is CARRY. Enjoy.

Detective Maggie Sutton pushed her long brown hair off her face, removed her glasses, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Another wasted hour. As she’d done every Monday morning since returning to work six weeks ago, three months to the day when her partner had been killed and she’d been shot, she’d gone over all the tips that had come in over the department’s tip line. She picked up the folder to carry it back to the bullpen.

Someone knew something. This was Robbinsville, Ontario, population 45,000, not Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. Sure, like everywhere else in the country or the world, they had problems with theft, drugs, domestic abuse, but two police officers gunned down in an alley—it didn’t happen—but it had, and it had happened to her.

It was just a matter of time before someone spoke up. Someone knew something. There was a hundred-thousand-dollar reward waiting for whoever gave them information leading to the arrest and conviction of a cop killer—but not just any cop. Cliff Nolan had been good police, but more than that, he’d been good people and her friend. He left behind a wife and three kids, girls who would grow up without a daddy, and no one had a clue why it had happened. He didn’t deserve to be shot down like a dog in an alley, any more than she deserved to be maimed, never able to bear a child because of what the bullet had done to her. Finding those responsible was her holy grail, even if she had to spend the rest of her life searching for them. She wanted justice, but more importantly, she wanted to know why.

They’d been on their way to interview a suspect in a hit-and-run case when the call had come in over the radio—a man with a gun, harassing people in the alley behind Charlie’s, a dive bar only a few blocks from where they’d been. Nolan had been driving.

“Call it in. We’re nearby and it’s probably a hoax. The last time it was a kid, high on drugs, with a damn cigarette lighter that looked like a gun.” The memory of seeing Cliff drop, the red spot in his forehead at odds with the surprise on his face, and the searing pain of the bullet entering her abdomen just under the vest was one that continued to haunt her.

Don’t forget to check out the other Tuesday Tales.