“You never used to be mean,” she said.
He let her arm drop. She rubbed her elbow significantly, but wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“I didn’t break into Gunther’s place,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“You have a hard time believing me when I tell you the truth.”
When he’d come back to Walkers Ford, she’d said she was clean; instead, he figured out she was getting pills from multiple doctors in four different counties. He’d called every doctor, clinic, and hospital in a two-hundred-mile radius and warned them not to prescribe for her. When she found out, she’d screamed at him for an hour. All he’d done was drive her to get drugs from illegal sources.
You’ve lied to me too many times trembled on the tip of his tongue, but he held it back. “How’re you doing?”
She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked off into the distance. “Now this is a social call?”
“I still care,” he said.
“You used to care. Now you say it’s caring when you dial it in from Mars on a tin can attached to a piece of string. A kid died, Lucas. Big deal. Gangbangers die all the time and cops don’t shut down over it. They deal with it and move on. That’s the job. Dad said you don’t have the heart for police work.”
That should hurt. It was supposed to hurt, and at one time, it would have hurt. “I would have said you didn’t have the heart for it, either.”
He just stared at her until she dropped her gaze. “I’ll pay for treatment again.”
“I’ve got money,” she said.
“From where?”
“Mack Winston’s taking people hunting again,” she said. “He pays to use the land. My kind of work. I don’t do a goddamn thing, and I get paid.”
Back in the day, Tanya could run a six-minute mile. Back in the day, she’d turned every head in the precinct when she came to visit him. Back in the day, she’d do field-hand work during the day, stay out most of the night, then get up the next morning and do it all over again. She was built for work, hard work requiring muscle and brain. She was built to be a cop, and instead she walked the prairie and slept the day away and burned her brain cells with OxyContin.
“Did you see anything while you were out walking yesterday?”
“Near Gunther’s? No. I went the other direction, towards Brookhaven. I’m not using,” she said, looking him straight in the eye.
A lie, or she would have let him into the cabin. Which meant he couldn’t trust that she hadn’t broken into Gunther’s house, either. Frustration and regret cemented together in his gut. He put his hands on his hips and looked away. Nothing with Tanya was easy anymore. Nothing.
“Anything else?”
“You need anything?”
The words were out before he could stop them. She looked him over, taking in the badge on one hip, the gun holstered on the other. She would know his handcuffs were in a case at the small of his back. Standing in front of her wearing the signs of her shattered dream made the words a slap in the face.
To his utter shock, she didn’t launch herself at him, something she’d done when the drugs poisoned her system. A little smile, all the more devastating for the self-mocking edge to it, broke his heart. “Nothing you can give me, Lucas.”
Resignation was worse than her fury. He nodded toward the pickup. “How much to fix the transmission?”
“It’s fixed. I got it back a couple of days ago. I wasn’t kidding about Mack.” She shot him a glare, then turned and headed for the cabin. “Go away, Lucas. I didn’t steal from Gunther Jensen, and I don’t need anything from you.”
Fuck. Fuck it all. Lucas hauled open the Blazer’s door and thought about how good it would feel to pound on something. He picked up his cell phone and dialed the library.
“Walkers Ford Library, this is Alana. How can I help you?” The hint of laughter that lay under the pleasant words was a sound he hadn’t heard in what felt like a lifetime.
“Is it okay with you if I start demo on your kitchen tonight?”
A pause.
“It’s Lucas.”
“I know it’s you,” she said, and even over the phone line he could hear her cheeks heating. “You sounded . . . never mind. You don’t have to ask. You’re my landlord, the chief of police, and the guy I’m sleeping with.”
“None of those things give me permission to be in your house without your consent.”
“Go ahead. I have to run an errand after we close. I’ll be back at the house in a couple of hours.”
That would give him plenty of time to take measurements. “We’ll get supper in Brookings.”
“Brookings?”
“The location of the nearest home-improvement superstore,” he said. “Normally I’d shop local, but after the hardware store in town closed, that’s the best place to buy supplies.”