Twenty-nine Julys or More
Title: Twenty-nine Julys or More
Author: Randomrattle
Pairings/Characters: Mary and Marshall
Rating: R, NC-17 for language and sex.
Teaser/Summary: “Don’t make me choose,” he whispered to the shell of her ear. “Don’t force me to choose between this and being your partner.”
How things might have looked through the years; minor spoilers for “Trojan Horst. Character death, but not our faves. This story might give you some ambivalent feelings, but I always have a contented kind of joy when re-reading it.
Feedback keeps the writers writing!
Twenty-nine Julys or More
Three
They were partners for three years in July before Mary Shannon ceased looking only outward for affection and looked closer to home. It was a jungle trying to keep witnesses safe and she had arrived at the conclusion that it was just as much a jungle to put on lipstick to go out looking for some affection after her sixth version of The Most Horrible Date Ever.
“What exactly is it that you’re looking for in a relationship?” asked Marshall after thirty minutes of recap on Horrible Date Number Six.
She eyed him warily over the sheaf of papers she held, wondering if there was some trick in this question and decided there was none.
“Affection,” she said offhandedly.
“Any man in any joint will take a girl who looks like you home for affection,” he said, somewhat perplexed. “You tumble into bed with any date who’s worth skinning out of clothes-if that was your reason for dating, then why are you complaining they’re all horrible dates?”
“Jackass.”
She did not deny that she often picked up men just for action. Men did it all the time and she was certainly an equal opportunity kind of person.
“I’m just sayin’,” he protested. “It’s not because you want sex from them-you get sex from them whenever you want. So what else are you looking for?”
“Jesus, you ask questions,” she grumbled. “Can’t it just be a horrible date and you just mutter, ‘I’m sorry’ and let it go at that?”
“Futility is someone doing the same thing over and over again hoping to get different results. You’re as bad as those women who keep taking up with men who hit them.”
“I am not,” she protested. She tossed a crumpled piece of paper at him and he just blinked when it hit him, used to being a paper basketball target.
“So what are you looking for if it’s not physical affection, because you’re certainly able to get that?” He held his fingers open for the next hoop shot of some shredder-bound document. “There’s got to be something else…”
“I don’t know. Someone who’ll listen to me, piss-attitude and all, and still care about me. Someone who isn’t always trying to take me down a notch because I’m a woman and shouldn’t be strong.” Her shot missed, bouncing off a joint of his ring finger, and she swore at it and crumpled up another document. “Someone who I like well enough to spend time with outside of having sex, instead of spending all my energy trying to escape them once the sex is over.”
Her third attempt went through his fingers and she shot her hands in the air for the imaginary exultant dance.
Marshall shook his head, amused. He looked over the desk covered with papers and crumpled documents, said blandly, “You get all those things from me and I’m not your boyfriend, so there must be something else you’re after and you just haven’t figured it out yet.”
Then he was back to scribbling because Stan had delivered an ultimatum about the WITSEC reports that were piled up and the goal was to finish today and they had seventeen to go.
They were done with twelve minutes to spare, celebrated at Cavenaugh’s Burgers because they had onion rings to die for … and Mary contemplated Marshall’s question and the inadvertent answer he had given.
He was her best friend. Her only friend. And she needed him right where he was. Besides, there was no reason to think Marshall had feelings for her beyond friendship, anyway.
Then Horst happened and Marshall was shot. There was a stunning conversation while he struggled with pain and his breathing and she had her answer. Not in words, no, but what man fighting to survive a bullet wound takes the time to explain why he was contemplating leaving a partnership some 1080 days strong? Deciding if he was walking away from his only friend?
“You can’t quit,” she said, testing the strength of this connection.
And that single sentence held him with her.
Four
During June 30ths Horrible Date number three of the year, she realized she was spending more energy waiting and watching for the date to fail than she was hoping that something clicked with the man. She wasn’t one to mince words or waste her time and she dropped him off at his apartment with little more than a ‘see you later’, which they both knew meant, ‘never.’
She went to Marshall’s house automatically, found him watching some inane Japanese Game Show and laughing himself hoarse. She kicked off her shoes and sat close enough to rob the rest of his popcorn and for the next forty-five minutes, she relaxed and contemplated his familiar companionship. Everything she was searching for and not finding. Everything she found here and what she had not yet found.
When he had finished his third beer and the show was rolling credits, she said very carefully, “I’ve figured it out.”
“What’ve you figured out?” he returned, brushing popcorn off his jeans.
“I’ve been looking for you.” She was perfectly honest. Candid with herself and, now, with him.
“I’ve been right here,” he said, his speech slightly slurred and slower than normal. “You’ve got me on speed-dial, Mer. All you had to do was ring me up.”
She didn’t mince words, nor waste time-she kissed him right there on the couch amidst stray popcorn kernels. He kissed her back, mouth tasting of Widmer, before his brain caught up and he thought to ask her why. Why this, why now, just … why?
“Ask me in July,” and she kissed him again.
He was uncertain and somewhat baffled while she unbuttoned his shirt. She kept her breath on his face, kissed him coaxingly when he hesitated and by the time her hands were on his jeans, his body had taken over. The windows were thrown wide in his bedroom when she settled over his hips the first time. She loved the way he bridged his back to meet her, the way his hands roved her torso and breasts hungrily, his kisses that were somewhat frantic. She had had many lovers, but he was the first she knew so well before taking into her body. She was too enamored by his raw responses to her to pay attention to her own passion and she hung her head over his, watching, when he climaxed with a strangled cry.
“Don’t make me choose,” he whispered to the shell of her ear. “Don’t force me to choose between this and being your partner.”
“I won’t,” she whispered back. She was waiting for all his questions and wondered if she had an answer for any of them.
By the time he roused the second time, the fan was running to keep the temperature down. He was less frenetic, less raw need, but more quietly intense. Lust had given way to passion. To love. Something she had never accepted or trusted in her bed, but accepted now. Trusted now.
The clock chimed 1 am when they eventually went to sleep. It was July and he was too sleepy to ask anything. It never crossed her mind to get her clothes and sneak quietly away as she had so often done before.
“I love you,” he said when she opened her eyes in the morning.
“I know,” was all she could give him honestly, yet he was happy with just that.
Six
They said nothing to Stan McQueen. Even though they knew he would have loved to know about the change in their relationship, they said nothing. Departmental policy was perfectly clear about fraternization between partners and strictly enforced, so Marshall Mann and Mary Shannon gave nothing away.
Marshall continued just as before, brimming with trivia, and Mary swung through her moods and endured the random details that peppered her day. They argued like siblings on a routine basis and Stan broke it up just as routinely. They spent the majority of their time together as partners anyway, but now there were clandestine rendezvous once or twice a week late at night. They fortified themselves with espresso to cover tiredness the day afterward.
Marshall lived for those nights and never asked for more. He never was petulant, never whined. He kissed her goodbye without rancor. Said hello over coffee and the desk just as smoothly.
Mary lived for those nights, too, but was not willing to have their partnership torn apart if they were discovered. The yearning and subterfuge kept every light on inside of her long after other relationships had darkened and became boring.
They were now two years and going strong.
Their caseloads grew heavier. They juggled them all without a single person lost and a record 67 witnesses made it successfully to trial that year. She low-fived Marshall as he passed her desk when Stan enthusiastically got the numbers from his superior and passed it along to everyone in the department.
Only Jinx noticed that Mary’s moods had calmed and when she caught Marshall in the alleyway between the houses with her daughter’s face in his hands, she knew why.
“Sillies,” she called out the bathroom window. “If you don’t want to be caught, then get in the house and hide in the basement. You know Brandi’s scared of the spiders.”
Jinx never said a thing to Stan, either, even in June when he stopped by the house with papers for Mary to sign and found Marshall at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and his boots off. Jinx dumped a drawer full of papers on the table and was singing Marshall’s praises for helping her sort out her taxes just as the front door opened to admit him
“You’re as convincing a liar as your daughter,” solemnly said Marshall after Stan left.
“Where do you think she learned that skill?” she cheerfully replied, sweeping the papers back into the drawer. “This is kind of fun, hiding you like a fugitive right in plain sight.”
Marshall laughed so hard, he spilled his wine.
After a six-day string of hot July days, when Marshall stayed over because they had central air, Jinx wrestled an extra dresser out of the garage and put in it Mary’s room, empty. She was humored that he always took his dirty laundry home to wash himself.
“Marry this one, honey,” she said to her daughter. “They don’t make men like this.”
Nine
“Why aren’t you dating, Mary?” inquired Bev out of bookkeeping. “You’re a pretty gal; why aren’t you out there?”
“Boyfriends are mostly a lot of work,” she returned. “Been there, done that. It just complicates my already complicated life.” She speared a tomato in her salad. “When I’m done working, I don’t want to be taking care of some man who expects me to be the little woman picking up his socks and fixing his dinner.”
“But…” she looked perplexed. “Don’t you get lonely? Don’t you want to go out to movies and get flowers…”
“Oh, God, the romantic drivel.” Mary laughed, but irritation gave it a harsh edge. “I spend nearly 16 hours a day with Marshall hiding troubled people, and my mom and ditzy sister live with me. How in the hell can I get lonely when I’m never alone?” She pointed her fork at the other girl. “Women need to learn they don’t need a man to keep them happy. With 13 million sex toys out on the market, a woman doesn’t even need a man for a good time-she can get it herself.” She was annoyed enough to dump the rest of her salad and snap the lid back on her steel coffee cup. “Laura Schlessinger has a book out called, ‘10 Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives’ and I think it should be required reading for every girl above age fourteen.”
Backpedaling now. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”
“Not mad. Just irritated that my personal life should be anyone business. Kindly don’t make it yours.”
She swung herself into the hallway … and there was Marshall at Conference Room A with two folders in one hand, his coffee in the other. His eyes did not quite meet hers.
Mary Shannon never evaded trouble. She took a slightly deeper breath and came straight to him.
“How much did you hear?” she asked quietly.
“Enough.” His tenor was steady, but his gaze was on the face sheet of the folders. “Which one of these do you want to intake, the Ebbeson family or Mr. Craig, who’s a bomb maker?”
“You understand why I had to say those things.” She took one file from him, flipped it open to glance at it and then looked in his face. “No one here can find out. They’ll-”
“-I know,” he said somewhat curtly. “Just … let it go.”
“I know I hurt your feelings,” she murmured. “Let’s take these files on a ride along and we can talk over some-”
“No.” Direct. He took the file back from her without malice, dumped his coffee in the water fountain. “Just leave me be for a while. I’ll be fine.”
“Marshall…”
He looked at her finally; face impassive even if his eyes were not. She fell silent, pricked.
“Leave me alone.” Wounded beneath that frozen exterior. “I just need to grind my gears for a while and then I’ll be fine.” He intercepted her protest with a lifted finger, “But I won’t be fine if you keep pushing-let me walk away.”
She let him walk away.
He was gone for most of the rest of the afternoon and she stayed behind in the office and caught up on administrative duties. She was under Stan’s fingernails, firing overdue emails to various places like missiles, updating witness files, purging records and generally getting a lot done while making the whole office tense. Stan intercepted Marshall at the APD office downstairs as he was coming in.
“Whatever the hell just happened, can you please undo it?”
Marshall quirked his sideways smile, said calmly, “I didn’t see a fireball roll into the heavens from this side of town, so …”
“Only because it was invisible.
“Half the time the world is ending,” he called over his shoulder.
He was calm and she was quiet. He flipped the same two files open on the desk and leaned on his knuckles over them.
“I think we should take Mr. Craig because he’s facing seven counts and if anyone is going to crack and go on the lam, it’ll be him. It’ll take our experience to nail him when he makes a break for it.”
“Good call.” She looked up as Stan keyed himself in. “Pass the Ebbeson family off to another team-we’ll take Mr. Bomber.”
He was home less than forty minutes, just long enough to take a shower and drink a beer, when the phone rang.
“Let me take you somewhere,” Mary said.
“We don’t need to talk about this,” he said somewhat wearily. “I know why you said those things in front of the office staff. If Stan gets wind of things, he’ll be forced to do something he doesn’t want to do. We’re saving ourselves.” He added more quietly, “We’ve been together for six years. I’m counting on you to have the balls to tell me if you’re not happy and want out of this. Like you said, a woman doesn’t need a man anymore to make her happy or show her a good time.”
Silence on her end.
“Get dressed, Marshall,” she said. “I’m coming to pick you up.”
“I don’t want to fight with you.”
“So please don’t argue now,” she said calmly. “Get dressed.”
She picked him up, drove thirty miles north to the Blue Moon Theater and bought the popcorn.
“A chick flick?” he said incredulously. “This is even a horrible one, according to the critics and you hate chick fli-”
“-Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”
Fine was not quite the right word, because as soon as the lights dimmed, she had her fingers on his belt buckle in the back row of the nearly deserted theater. He protested, fumbled with her hands until he encircled her wrists.
“I lied to Bev,” she said, breathy and ticklish in his ear. “There are some things a dildo just doesn’t do. It doesn’t squirm and get breathless and pull on the headboard until it creaks. It can’t lay you over the hood of a truck, virgin slow.” Belt undone, button unsnapped. “It doesn’t gasp erotic things, or murmur gentle profanities telling me how it feels in response to what I’m doing.” Fingers through the fly, pulling him free from the jockeys. “Sit back and enjoy the movie, Marshall, because I certainly am.”
He did not see much of the movie. They necked like teenagers in the back row and he had her bra off beneath her shirt before ten minutes had passed. The love scene had nothing on theirs, petting heavily, nearly undone. He grit his teeth when she went down on him, rocking into the furnace of her mouth helplessly. He had never climaxed so hard as he did then, vision swirling to black, his hands tight on the armrests.
She kissed him when she came up, the salty-sweet tang of himself in her mouth.
“You’re the most uncomplicated thing in my world,” she whispered. “You’re not amongst the ten stupid things that I’ve done to mess up my life.”
He held her tightly, wordlessly, for a few minutes before saying, “Let’s get out of here.”
He drove and stopped by a local Safeway unexpectedly, came out with a bouquet of flowers. She smiled and inhaled their perfume … then batted him very gently on the head with them.
“Idiot man.”
“We’ll see if you’re still calling me that after I’ve gone down on you for an hour.”
Ten
Three witnesses in a row came under gunfire that year and the U.S. Marshals service intercepted every one of them. A bullet in the third incident caught Mary just below the ribcage, and Marshall had her down in the gravel beside the pavement with his palm pressed on the wound so hard that she was swearing six kinds of hell at him.
“Keep yelling at me,” he said. “It tells me you’re still alive.”
The paramedics took over in fifty-two minutes and after a fast ambulance ride, surgery, and two pints of blood, she was fine. Or as fine as what passed for Mary Shannon confined to a hospital bed. She had every nurse and orderly rubbed the wrong way by the time Marshall coasted in with his jacket gone and his shirt as rumpled as if he’d taken a header off the edge of the highway.
“Did you get him?” she demanded.
“I got him and kicked his ass,” replied Marshall. “Then I kicked his ass for you, too.” Next, more gloomily, “I think Stan is going to put a letter of reprimand in my file over it.”
“Your first one,” she said dryly, contemplating her five reprimand letters. “My, you’re growing up.”
The injury sidelined her for two weeks. Marshall was known to show up at her house with pie at 1:20 in the afternoon and stay for an hour rattling off everything going on at WITSEC. The meringue wilted in summer heat because he didn’t eat it fast enough.
Twelve
A witness died in summer, but not for lack of protection by Marshall. She was the oldest witness in the program and had been in protected status for 32 years. For 20 of them, she had lived with a combination of heart disease and diabetes, but it was cancer that finally killed her. Marshall stood amidst the bedroom of knick-knacks and embroidery and newspapers to say goodbye. Hospice services had enabled her to stay in her cluttered little house to the very end.
He was noticeably silent on the ride home. She stayed the night without question, but was discerning enough to just hold him. He was calm and thoughtful the next day and disappeared at 2 pm for an appointment with a lawyer.
“Sign this,” he said to her that evening. It was a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care. “My Will is all set, but this hasn’t been done.”
“Marshall-.”
“Don’t string me out with tubes and wires and interventions,” he interrupted. “When it’s time to go, you’ve got to let me go.”
Silence.
“You’d better be waiting for me on the other side.”
“I’ll be building us a house in heaven,” he assured her with a crooked smile.
“Or plotting in hell,” she corrected and nudged him with an elbow. “You-n-me? We can take over.”
“Bring dynamite,” he said cheerfully.
When he lay with her that night, he was silent, pleading with her uneasiness with his hands, his eyes, the hot kisses between her thighs that crazed her. She responded with a fierce possessiveness that hadn’t been in his bed for several years.
Sixteen
He didn’t feel well in the spring. She had never done the worried girlfriend role and she did not start now. They kept the fast schedule as they always had, managing twenty-two witnesses apiece. He lost weight very gradually over a three-week span of time, but she never noticed this, either. The largest criminal trial in New Mexico was ramping up and they had the star witness in their pocket.
Marshall was slow up the courthouse steps on July the 17th and she thought nothing of it, too busy confronting Mr. Kamm’s shifty lawyer. The trial was long and boring. He doodled on a notepad and she tapped her fingers impatiently against her badge. When the verdict came in, she wanted to celebrate, but Marshall begged off and went home. Mary went out with Dershowitz and McQueen instead and didn’t drag in until 1 am.
“I don’t feel very good,” he complained in the morning when she came to pick him up.
“You whine every morning when it’s 6:20,” she replied, though she knew she was usually the one to complain.
She pulled into the driveway of Caleb Demrose’s house in a shower of gravel, but Marshall just sat in the seat. She was clear around the nose of the GMC before she noticed and she jerked his door open, then halted her tirade. He was pale and sweaty, hands in his lap, and merely rolled his head sidelong against the headrest to look at her.
“I don’t feel good,” he said simply, unable to swing his leg out of the truck.
“Jesus Christ, Marshall, you’re white as death,” she said, a hand against his face, “you can’t be blowing fuses when we’re trying to work. Why didn’t you tell me you were really sick, as in, ‘Goddammit, Mary, I’m sick!’”
“I canna stop it, Kept’ain, she’s…” but he couldn’t finish his trademark Scotty quip because he ran out of breath. His eyes were frightened, though his expression was stilled. “My chest hurts,” he whispered. “It’s hard to breath.”
She resnapped his seatbelt, unfastened the top buttons of his shirt. “I’m driving you to the ER right now.”
“Yes,” he agreed and that frightened her more than a wealth of words.
“How do I get you the fastest help?” she said as the Emergency Room door came in view.
“Tell them it’s a heart attack.”
“Please don’t be having a heart attack, Marshall. You’re too young to be having a heart attack.”
“I’m over fifty-five. Heart attacks are common.”
“No, you’re not having a heart attack.” She said it as if she should be obeyed.
A patient presenting with cardiac symptoms did indeed get prompt attention and the badge she flashed and the one he wore guaranteed the best of the best amongst the staff. They would have thrown Mary Shannon out of the cubicle if they had been less focused on him. There were vital signs and six vials of blood drawn and ECG strips and an enormous X-Ray machine and two physicians rattling off orders until a third from Cardiology joined them-she was petrified, but Marshall watched her with eyes that showed no fear at all now.
He was long past fear. All that was left was her face and the agony that pinned him.
“His blood pressure is elevated, the ST intervals elongated.” The Cardiologist spoke briskly. “He’s in sinus tach with a couple of ectopic beats. If this is an MI, only the cardiac enzymes are going to tell us. We’ll have to wait for-”
“He’s not talking,” interrupted Mary. “Marshall is a talker-he fell silent twenty minutes ago.”
The doctor glanced down at his patient, really saw him. “Anyone think to get Mr. Mann out of pain?”
Two milligrams of IV Dilaudid later and Marshal’s eyes were hazy, his speech slurred. His hands were open for the first time in hours, fingers lax through the bar of the side rail holding hers. Stan McQueen had pulled up a chair and the overhead lights illuminated the sweat on top of his head. Marshall crawled his other hand through the side rail and held Stan’s on the other side and the older man raised no objection.
“Good news,” said the Cardiologist thirty minutes later. “It’s not his heart, but the blood work tells us he’s got some muscle damage somewhere. Has he done anything particularly strenuous in the past weeks?”
“Marshall? Hell no,” said Mary. “Wait … a fender bender a little over three weeks ago, but it-”
The Physician in charge of Radiology popped through the curtain.
“Hello, Dr. Hunter. I think I have the answer to the problem. Mr. Mann has a rib dislocated off the sternum and double pneumonia.” He looked at first Stan, then Mary. “The dislocated rib is the cause of the mid-sternal pain that is mimicking a heart attack and causing the muscle cell death. The pneumonitis is aggravating everything else.”
“Oh God, we thought it was serious,” said Stan.
“It is serious,” corrected Dr. Hunter, “but it’s treatable.” He glanced at his colleague. “I’ll get a gram of Ancef going IV.”
“I’ll get a team from physiotherapy to get his rib back in.” He glanced at Stan and Mary. “You’ll have to step out of the room, I’m afraid. This takes quite a bit of manipulation and hurts like hell.”
When the doctors scattered to give orders, Mary kissed Marshall over the top of the side rail and Stan McQueen never batted an eye.
“Did you hear all of that, doofus?” she said.
“I’m not dying.”
“Not yet, but I might kill you later for giving me heart problems!”
Mary did not kill him later, because when the three men left his cubicle after snapping Marshall’s rib back in place, they were sweating and shaking out their hands as if they’d just dug a twenty foot trench, six feet deep. Marshall was pale and abjectly silent and the fingers she gingerly held were tremulous. He never said a word about what had been done to him and she did not ask. By the time the nurse arrived with a small bag of antibiotics, he was asleep.
She took him home after 8 hours of observation, tucked him into bed. She had never done the hovering girlfriend role, but she did it now-she brought everything into the room he could possibly need and was searching for a bell so he could call for her instead of shouting.
“Quit,” he said tiredly. “Just lie down here with me. That’s all I need.”
Nineteen
“Why didn’t you ever ask me to marry you, Marshall?”
He wasn’t surprised at the question. They were driving 165 miles to pick up a witness and Mary always hatched intense conversations in a vehicle so she could have an excuse to not always have to look him in the eye. So she had something to do with her hands. He suspected it was also because it didn’t permit her to flee the scene, either.
He was glad of the long drives for just this reason.
“It would have blown our covert relationship, don’t you think? Some big shiny diamond on your hand?”
“Oh, you so wouldn’t have been able to buy some big shiny diamond,” she scoffed.
“I would have, but then you wouldn’t have worn it.”
She thought about it for 1/8th of a mile.
“Probably not. I’d bend the setting punching some idiot while trying to get information out of him.”
“So I should put a steel ball bearing in a ring setting for you instead? Cool!”
“Jackass.” But she was laughing.
He let a mile run beneath the tires.
“I wanted to leave you free to go,” he said without looking at her-the surest way to get her to glance at him. “If I left you free, then you would never feel the need to fight to get away.” He caught her eye, briefly. “I hoped you’d stay as long as the door was always open, so I always left it open.”
She said nothing. He could tell she was gritting her teeth. He could also tell she was blinking too quickly, even behind her sunglasses. Both indicators of Mary Shannon fighting back tears, because she did not do the weepy girlfriend tripe.
“That’s one of the things I love about you,” she eventually offered. “You always understand.” She glanced his way. “But do you wish it was different?”
It was his turn to be rattled. It was another mile before he answered thoughtfully.
“I used to, because I grew up with the thought that I’d marry and have kids. I don’t … think that way anymore.” He threw a glance to her, was surprised when she caught it. “We are what we are and I’m glad for what we have. How many cops do you know that end up with failed marriages because they’re too tight with their partners, but they can’t make a life with their partner either? We’ve been partners for nineteen years and lovers over sixteen.” He watched a billboard squirt by advertising new cars with 0% financing. “We’re one in a million, Mary. One in a million. I wouldn’t trade that away for anything.”
She never spoke of it again.
Twenty-one
“What do you mean, you want to slow down?”
They were in the corner office, a place they had acquired when the WITSEC building was remodeled in 2025 and Stan McQueen retired. It was his final act before he turned his position over to his replacement, to move his best team into private quarters and away from the junior Investigators.
It was also closest to the coffee machine and break room, a fact which Mary often reminded Stan when the building was reworked.
“I want a day off during the week,” replied Marshall.
“And give the rookies six of our families? Every one of our witnesses is ours because they’re in the most danger, Marshall. Any in particular you’d like to get bumped off, or is this a turkey shoot?”
He looked at her, blandly, waiting out the tirade. It took her less than three minutes, because when Marshall didn’t fight back, it genuinely meant something. She perched her hip on the side of the desk they shared.
“Why do you want to slow down?” she asked more quietly.
“I’m tired,” he replied just as softly. “We’ve been at this for a long time and we keep a pace that not even the fresh paint through the door can manage-and they’re thirty or more years younger than you.”
“Yeah,” she scoffed, “and they’re not us.”
“No.” Softly, but proudly. “They’re not us. There’s not a team west of the Mississippi that has our record and Kelly and Mac only have us by 2%.”
“They probably cheat,” she huffed.
“They do not cheat,” he corrected. He cocked back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head. “Mac is just as hell-bent as you are and Kelly is as neurotic about the details like I am. They’re you and I, only flipped.”
“So,” she redirected. “Why do you want to slow down and will you kindly tell me the truth?”
“I told you-I’m tired.” He leaned his forearms across the slew of papers she’d scattered on the desk. “I go to bed tired, I wake up tired. I’m sleeping enough hours, but I’m still tired. This isn’t a ‘need more sleep’ kind of tired when even the weekends don’t revive me.” He fidgeted with his hands. “And I … hurt a bit.”
She took the pencil she’d been fiddling with and laid it across the top of his hand, the simple gesture they fell back to in lieu of touching physically in the office and giving themselves away.
“What do you mean, you hurt? Where? When did this start?” She never raised her voice, but all her alarm bells were ringing.
He answered just as quietly, but looked at the desk of papers instead of in her face-a fact she instantly noticed.
“It’s been creeping up on me for a few years now. My back hurts every day, my shoulder blade where that fractured bullet sits.” He opened and closed his hands, watching his fingers. Mary watched them too, wary. “My fingers ache all the time. Doctor thinks I have arthritis starting up and all this paperwork aggravates it. I hate Mondays for more reasons than usual.” He glanced up at her, finally. “I’m getting old, Mary.”
“I am too, but I’m not letting it slow me down.”
He said nothing, merely waited.
“Okay.” She was calm, businesslike, adjusting her mental picture. “I’ll speak to Parker, tell him we want to step back a day.”
“Wednesday,” Marshall said. “I already spoke with him.”
“Without talking to me first?”
“I have to slow down.” He looked at her. “And you love me, so you’ll support what I need.”
She paused, because she didn’t say it often and it was therefore automatically weighted, “I do love you. And I’ll support what you need.”
When she drove him to his house late that night, she sat down with all his prescriptions and physicians instructions over the last year and read every one. When he brought her a beer and sat in the wing chair while she read, she noticed the gray in his sideburns and temple more than usual. The laugh lines around his eyes were deeper.
“I’m just getting older,” he soothed when she crawled into his lap and huddled on a shoulder. “I can’t keep that pace anymore. It’s breaking me down. Most folks in law enforcement retire after twenty years, Mer, and we’re still at it.”
“Can we not talk about this?”
“Okay.” He smoothed a hand down her back, traced her bra strap. “Can we go to bed instead?”
“I thought you were tired,” she chided.
“Not that tired.”
He said nothing about how she was changing. Mentioned nothing about the gray in her hair, the way her breasts hung, the veins more prominent in her legs. The fact that she forgot simple things and squinted at 12-point typeface and popped Tylenols all day. She got lost driving the south side of Albuquerque last month and had locked herself out of her house four times.
She was beautiful as always to him. And aging or not, his body always responded eagerly to her.
Twenty-four
Jinx Shannon died on July 7. She was sitting in her favorite club enjoying a wealth of attention as always when she slumped off of the barstool. The man closest caught her, thinking this was just a fun diversion by the fiery elderly woman … but her pulse was erratic and she was unconscious.
She never woke. Marshall hit 86 mph on the highway to the hospital, but all the lights and sirens in the world could not get Mary to her mother before she died. They performed advanced CPR for thirty-eight minutes before the MD called it off.
“A ruptured aneurysm, more than likely,” said the ER doctor. “She should have responded to the amount of pharmaceuticals we used but … nothing. That indicates a major incident either in the brain or in the blood. We will be able to tell you more after an autopsy. I am very sorry for your loss. There are a few papers we need you to sign…”
Mary looked at Marshall, stunned, her brain still trying to process what had just happened.
“She’ll sign whatever you need, Doctor,” he said calmly. “Can we just have a minute with her mother?”
“Of course. Take all the time you need.”
Mary had seen death before. Grisly deaths, not-so-grisly deaths … deaths she’d been party to, deaths she had caused herself. None were like this. None brought this silence within her head. The absence of every internal dialogue, every random thought about events of the day. She stood beside the body staring down at a stranger, unable to say anything, do anything.
Marshall was not immobilized, however, and he laid his left hand on Jinx’s forehead very gently. A gesture so like a benediction that it brought her from the silent distance of shock. She took her mother’s hand, felt the faint warmth that remained. Marshall pulled a chair close, pressed her into it.
“You have about ten minutes,” he quietly said. “Stan just texted me-they’ve located Brandi and she’s being brought in by a squad car.”
“Hysterical, no doubt.”
“She doesn’t know yet. She’s knows it’s bad, but not that she’s gone.”
“Okay.” She was calm. Controlled. The steadfast training of a U.S. Marshal fully operational. A trait she depended on now more than ever. “Let me know when she’s in the hallway.”
The hospital scene with Brandi was difficult, dramatic, and desperate. Mary handled it with exactly the amount of tenderness and strength required, a bulwark that her sister leaned on in times of trouble, great and small. It was hours before it was over, the papers were signed, Jinx’s personal effects gathered, and Brandi safely escorted home to her current boyfriend.
“Come home with me,” Marshall said, sliding behind the wheel.
“Not tonight,” she said, leaning her head against the side of the truck.
“Not for that,” he returned, his voice mildly wounded. “Just so you’re not … not home around all of her things.”
“Marshall,” she sighed, “I need to go home especially to be around all of her things. My mother was the drama-her things weren’t.” She looked at him, saw the sharp scrutiny that he fixed on her. “Trust me on this. I need to go home.”
He took her home. She brought in the mail, dropped some flakes into the goldfish tank, pulled the kitchen garbage can out next to the door to remind herself to take the big can to the curb in the morning. Marshall made toast, then boiled water for tea. By the time Mary ran out of simple puttering tasks, he had a plate of buttered bread and two steaming cups. It was the first thing she’d eaten since 7 am.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said eventually. She had the water running when she swung her head around the doorframe. “Don’t sit there-come on.”
He waited until she was through shampooing her hair and conditioning it before touching her and even then, just laid his hands gently on her shoulders.
“I won’t break,” she said.
“Sadly, no you won’t.”
She hugged into his embrace, took note of the fact that he let her stand in the spray of hot water while he got chilled standing out of it. He always put her first, even when there was no crisis. She tilted her head, intention unmistakable, and he kissed her obligingly. Then again, because she jerked her chin at him the way she did when she was bossy.
A third, thoughtfully. The fourth, slower still, wet and open.
“I didn’t come here for this,” he whispered into her mouth.
“You always come here for this.”
“No.” But then he rephrased when she chuckled against him, “Okay, yes, but that’s not what I came here for today.”
“It’s why I brought you home.”
“Mary-”
“Hush. Just do what I want.”
Marshall disliked shower sex as a rule. The prelude to sex, yes. Actual sex, no. There wasn’t enough room, it was too slick to properly pick her up, and Marshall had trouble picking her up on good days let alone in the confines of a shower with both of them slippery as seals.
But the warm-up … yes. And after a few more seconds of him hesitating, his body was responding to the wet slide of her skin against his, the half-tender and half-fierce grip of her hands in his hair. She was good for just the kissing while his erection filled, then he tucked between her thighs without penetrating, teasingly.
“Bad boy,” she said.
“Your bad boy.”
“My favorite bad boy.”
They went to bed damp and uncaring. Marshall turned her on her back and drug her to the edge bodily, a hand beneath a knee to open her, and then he was in-hard and fast-the aggressive way she liked out of him when the day was harsh.
“Oh God,” she groaned, fingers wrapped around his forearms, her grip guiding him on how much forcefulness she wanted. “Just like … stay just like…”
He had learned to be a good lover with her. Learned the control he never had as a young man on rare dates. He thought about other things, work and his car registration almost due and how many gallons of milk were in his fridge, instead of the woman in his arms. The only one in his heart. And he gave her what she wanted and needed, because that’s what he did.
He knew she climaxed by the nails that bit into him and the howl of bliss, but hung on for a handful more thrusts to be sure she wasn’t just skipping like a stone through several in a row. She told him she was done with all the little signals that longtime lovers develop and only then did he let his mind focus. Let everything he felt for her, his longing and need for her, free to run. She held him tight, met the urgency of his kisses, listened to the sound through his chest as pleasure found him.
She let him hold her in the aftermath because she knew he loved to. He turned on the TV because he knew she loved something for her mind to focus on. For a long time, there was just the tangle of their embrace and the late news.
“My mother sure made a mess of her life,” she said to his neck.
“It was a fun mess most of the time.”
“She did have fun.” She peered sidelong at him. “Played hard, crashed and burned hard.”
“Reminds me of you.” He twitched at the poke she gave him. “You got some of your best features from your mom.”
“Be grateful I didn’t pick up the Be Drunk Daily feature from her.”
He pulled away enough to see her face clearly, smoothed a damp lock aside.
“Your mother loved you.”
“Yeah.”
“And she loved me because I made you happy. But most of all,” he said solemnly, “she was proud that you were strong and sensible and savvy enough to be a U.S. Marshal. You’re the person she was most proud of.”
“My mother had nothing to do with me being a U.S. Marshal,” she said somewhat irritably.
“She knew that, too. She told me that as soon as you got away from her, your life became something wonderful and it took all of her strength to stay away and let you go on to become someone. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, that’s when she came and moved in with you.” He was very solemn. “She wanted to watch one of her children be successful when she never seemed to be able to. She was a wreck beside the road of life, she said to me once, but as long as you were that road running straight as an arrow, she was okay with being a wreck beside the road.”
She wept finally, fourteen hours after her mother collapsed. It was July 8.
Twenty-six
“Jesus.”
She sat down, stared at him.
“I know this is going to happen someday, Marshall, but … now? You want to retire now? You’re only sixty-five and you were aiming for sixty-eight.”
“I’m ready,” he said softly. “My hands are starting to shake. I’m due next year for my twenty-yard proficiency and I know I can’t pass it.”
“You know Parker will let that stupid gun test slide, Marshall. This job is more than being able to put a two inch spread in a target at twenty yards.”
“I’m not willing to carry a gun in this kind of job when I know that I haven’t got the goods anymore,” he said somewhat sternly. “If I’m not solid behind this badge, then it’s time to hang it up.” His eyes softened. “I have to give it up before they take it from me, because I couldn’t bear it if they take it. It’s time for me to retire and I’m ready.”
“Well I’m not,” she answered emphatically.
“You don’t have to retire with me.”
She blinked at him, said slowly, “You don’t expect me to retire with you?”
“No, why would I? You can stay on until you’ve had enough.”
It was breathtaking, heart stopping, to consider going on without him. For several moments, Mary let the chill of that wash through her. She remembered the terror the first time he had been shot and she feared he would die. And she didn’t even need him, love him, then.
“No.” Fingers over her eyes to hold back treacherous tears. “No, I can’t do this without you. I won’t go on with some other idiot partner-I’ve already got your idiocy properly trained. They tried to re-partner us three times after Stan retired and only gave it up because our success number crashed, you almost got killed, and I nearly strangled my new associates or they, me.
“If it’s time for you to step down, then it’s,” she paused, struggled to speak the words, “it’s time for me to retire, too.” She looked at him. “We’re partners and we’ve been in step for twenty-six years.”
She saw his undisguised tears and realized how much it had cost him to give her permission to stay. How even over their span of years, he still was braced for her to step away and go on without him. Still expecting her to leave. Her soul felt trampled.
“I only work with you,” she said softly, leaning her face so close that if anyone spotted them, their secret would be throughout the office and clear to WITSEC Headquarters in less than fifteen minutes. “You’re the only partner I want, the only man I want. Pick the date and I’ll retire with you.”
His voice held the barest tremble, but his words were perfectly clear as he made the decision for them both.
“Next July. We have one more year.”
After she left the office for the records archive, Marshall put his face in his hands, grateful he did not have to pressure her. Mary’s hearing was failing in her right ear and nerve damage from the single bullet she had taken was impairing her coordination. She held the wall in the shower when she rinsed the shampoo out because of dizziness and the last time she had run down a subject on foot, she’d fallen so badly that she cracked her right tibia.
The GPS in the truck kept her from getting lost amongst familiar city streets every day.
Twenty-seven
“I’m going to sell my house,” he said in February.
“What? Why?” she demanded almost on autopilot.
“I want to move up into the hills,” he replied, “buy a ranch house out so far that I can’t be found.”
She glanced sidelong at him, noticed he was driving with both hands on the wheel. His hair was salt and pepper, his whiskers in the morning before he shaved completely gray.
“I can still find you.”
“Wouldn’t be hiding from you, now would I?” he chuckled.
They passed the market on Seventh Street, then the new JC Penny on eighth.
“Is it hard to get a realtor and sell a house?”
“No, but I’m going to sell my house myself. The paperwork is standard for all home sales. No magic involved. Realtor’s just like to take 12% of your profit for filling out the same thing you can fill out.”
She looked at him.
“Let me guess, you’ve read up on this?”
“You know your Marshall.”
She grinned, amused, then said seriously, “You want to sell my house, too?”
He fired a surprised glance her way as he took the corner onto Arline Drive.
“You don’t have to sell your house just because I’m selling mine.”
“I want to. Brandi is on her own and the place is full of memories. I’ll sell it and throw in with you.” She grinned. “You can buy a bigger ranch house back in the hills so far that we can’t be found.”
“So you’re planning to live in sin with me, Mary Shannon?” he chided.
“Haven’t we always been?” The wind tousled her hair through the open window. She colored it now and it was golden as summer wheat.
He pulled abruptly into the alley off of Arline, parked behind the pub next to the garbage bin. Empty alcohol bottles were loaded in cases four high to be carted away. He scooted on the bench seat and she scooted automatically to meet him, the four-wheel drive stick tangling their shins just as he got his fingers in the sunglow of her mane.
Four minutes later, she said, “I am not getting naked on this bench seat at ten in the morning, Mr. Mann.”
“I remember when you used to.”
“And I remember you hit your head on the roof.”
He grinned, blue eyes lively. “I don’t remember hitting my head. I think I was … distracted.” He kissed her again, lingeringly. “Living in sin, hm? Anyone ever tell you that sinners make the best Saints?”
After work, she drove him ten miles up McCarney Creek and shucked out of her clothes in the front seat of the GMC. Their bodies were slower, but the depth of passion remained the same. She made sure he did not hit his head on the roof.
Marshall put his house up for sale and it was gone in two weeks. He put everything in storage and lived in a crappy WITSEC apartment, though Mary Shannon mostly snuck him home with her. Marshall sank $1500 of new paint, new fixtures, and general updating into Mary’s house and it sold in a month. They were enthusiastically homeless together and fellow employees accused them of sleeping in the office because they looked a bit unkempt because of it.
He found a rambling ranch style home with a view of the valley below and bought it on the spot because Mary did not care. He brought a large moving truck up with a crew to unload his things and took only the company truck to move hers, because Mary did not keep anything except her clothes and a scrapbook or two. There were his dishes in the cupboards, his towels in the bathroom, his washer and dryer, his books ... Mary sold everything out of the house before it went to the new buyer and had the rest taken away to Goodwill Industries.
“I have what I need,” she said when he anxiously questioned her about it in the front yard. She loaded him in the WITSEC truck and left the sale to the men hired to do it without a backward glance. “There’s nothing there that I need to hang onto. Everything I want is right here.”
She took him to the pie shop, because he loved pie. His dominant hand shook while he ate and he was so used to the tremors that he did not notice them anymore. Mary had never noticed them quite as much as today.
“They’re planning a retirement party,” he said on the seventh of July.
“No, just no,” she said crossly. “I hate parties and every single one of them know it!”
“It’s not for you-it’s for me.” His expression was bemused. “I love parties.”
“Oh, in that case, I’ll come.”
It was a wild party in a bar with loud music. Albuquerque Police Department sent part of a squad, including Bobby Dershowitz, now gray himself. Stan McQueen came despite a stroke slowing him down.
Marshall wore a party hat and every sign, every card, the cake, the decorations on the table said, ‘Happy Retirement Marshall!’ Handwritten after his name were the words, ‘and Mary.’ The block lettering was his, because he was the only one who could get away with it and the department knew it. She cuffed him on the arm when she spotted it and Stan howled with recognition at that playful slap.
Everyone danced, except Stan, who was encumbered with a cane and Mary, who refused to dance as a rule. She wished her mother had lived to see this day, the tall rangy-boned man with the crazy hat sideways on his head, dancing like a loose piece of string with a whole department of fellow crazies.
But Mary surprised them all after enough beers had gotten beneath her belt, because she took to the floor with Marshall and danced to some wild tune with him. And he was zany enough to waltz part of it now and then, just to make everyone laugh, and Mary went along because he was her partner and she was used to crazy.
“Stan,” said Parker thoughtfully, watching the way his ex-Inspectors danced; the steps that matched, the press of their hips, the automatic segue into a waltz and then back out again that was so smooth it had to be well practiced. “How long have those two been intimate?”
“Oh,” said Stan. “I think it started about nine or ten years before I retired and you took over.”
“Why didn’t you tell me they were fraternizing?” he demanded incredulously. “You know that is strictly against the rules!”
Stan sipped his soda, because he was on medication that precluded drinking alcohol. He was so happy on this occasion that he did not need any extra buzz.
“Because it didn’t matter. They kept it out of sight and their success rate climbed three years in a row and remained consistent. How can you split up a team like that and call it justified? You tried to break up their partnership a few times; do you remember the fallout from that?” He grinned at the other man. “You never suspected a thing. That’s how good they were at hiding in plain sight.”
He cheered with everyone else when the dance ended a Marshall kissed her fleetingly. Mary rolled her eyes and shoved him away. Marshall laughed and perched a hip on the bar stool next to Stan.
“Good enough for you?” he said. “That’s about the most public display of affection you’ll see.”
“Good enough for me,” replied Stan, elbowing him. “You’re her best kept secret. She’ll probably never learn how to walk down a street and hold your hand properly, you know.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Marshall was stealing a bite of someone’s cake with a spare fork. “It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s with me.”
“She’s always been with you,” said Stan, downing the last of his soda.
They went to their new home up in the rugged hills overlooking Albuquerque for the first time together and Mary stood staring out over the city lights spilling like jewels on velvet. Marshall hooked his chin over her shoulder, curled his arms around her midsection.
“Pretty?” he asked.
“Absolutely. I’ve never thought of that town as beautiful, but it is from up here.”
“Every light is a diamond,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t wear one, but I bought this house just to give you these every night.”
She hugged his arms tighter, said nothing.
“I’ll marry you if you want,” he said.
“Do you want to?”
He thought about it only an instant and then said very quietly, “No piece of paper from City Hall has ever made any difference in my commitment to you. And I don’t need it to tell me your commitment to me.”
“Then, no.” She turned in his arms, looked wickedly into his eyes. “I’d rather live in sin. With you.”
They made love out on the terrace, beneath starlight. City glow illuminated her above him and he remembered the first time, her hair just as blonde, her eyes just as focused on his face. He gathered her to him, held her hips still an instant.
“I love you,” he said. “I don’t regret this life you’ve chosen for me.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered. She kissed his eyebrow, then the curl of white hair at his temple. “I’ve loved you longer than anything in my life.”
Twenty-eight
He planted a garden and put in flowers. The tremors steadied with a change of medication and the pain in his fingers eased. Sun and rest and the slow pace refreshed him inside and out and then Marshall was getting up at sunrise just as he did when he was a young man. He looked out over the valley protectively, still a Marshal, as if his steady regard was able to protect those below. Coffee curled steam around his face
Mary slept in until he brought her coffee and was frumpy until ten am. He was asleep in her lap by ten pm, her fingers smoothing through his hair, when CSI started and she began ordering the police around from the couch.
She idled for the first time in years and the doctor put her on Neurontin, which eased the nerve pain from the old wound. She could jog to the mailbox and back and did so every day without balance problems. She repainted every room in the house and built a deck. She got dirty in the garden with Marshall and learned more about bugs and weeds than any sane person ought. There was a dirt fight one day that left them breathless and filthy with no one there to break it up until they were exhausted.
She wondered if she would lose her mind with nothing constructive to do … but the following July, Dershowitz phoned with a tentative proposition; he had a person arriving in Albuquerque needing personal protection for a few days. Would either of them be interested in some sideline bodyguard work?
Marshall grinned at her. “Your gun is in the rifle case on the right. The badge is on the top shelf. Use your GPS, because they’re moving streets around all the time down there.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Hell no. I know you can’t leave it completely.” He looked her up and down, this smart savvy blonde still full of fight at age sixty-three. “It’s good for you to kick a little ass now and then.”
“Keeps me from kicking yours around up here,” she chuckled, twining hands through his.
He kissed her, coasted his breath along her face. She closed her eyes, drank in that soft caress that she had enjoyed for twenty-five years.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I know,” he replied, absolutely sure. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
And he always was-and Mary Shannon always came back.
~~~~~~~~~~~
All of my IPS fanfiction located at:
Randomrattle's Fanfiction
Author: Randomrattle
Pairings/Characters: Mary and Marshall
Rating: R, NC-17 for language and sex.
Teaser/Summary: “Don’t make me choose,” he whispered to the shell of her ear. “Don’t force me to choose between this and being your partner.”
How things might have looked through the years; minor spoilers for “Trojan Horst. Character death, but not our faves. This story might give you some ambivalent feelings, but I always have a contented kind of joy when re-reading it.
Feedback keeps the writers writing!
Twenty-nine Julys or More
Three
They were partners for three years in July before Mary Shannon ceased looking only outward for affection and looked closer to home. It was a jungle trying to keep witnesses safe and she had arrived at the conclusion that it was just as much a jungle to put on lipstick to go out looking for some affection after her sixth version of The Most Horrible Date Ever.
“What exactly is it that you’re looking for in a relationship?” asked Marshall after thirty minutes of recap on Horrible Date Number Six.
She eyed him warily over the sheaf of papers she held, wondering if there was some trick in this question and decided there was none.
“Affection,” she said offhandedly.
“Any man in any joint will take a girl who looks like you home for affection,” he said, somewhat perplexed. “You tumble into bed with any date who’s worth skinning out of clothes-if that was your reason for dating, then why are you complaining they’re all horrible dates?”
“Jackass.”
She did not deny that she often picked up men just for action. Men did it all the time and she was certainly an equal opportunity kind of person.
“I’m just sayin’,” he protested. “It’s not because you want sex from them-you get sex from them whenever you want. So what else are you looking for?”
“Jesus, you ask questions,” she grumbled. “Can’t it just be a horrible date and you just mutter, ‘I’m sorry’ and let it go at that?”
“Futility is someone doing the same thing over and over again hoping to get different results. You’re as bad as those women who keep taking up with men who hit them.”
“I am not,” she protested. She tossed a crumpled piece of paper at him and he just blinked when it hit him, used to being a paper basketball target.
“So what are you looking for if it’s not physical affection, because you’re certainly able to get that?” He held his fingers open for the next hoop shot of some shredder-bound document. “There’s got to be something else…”
“I don’t know. Someone who’ll listen to me, piss-attitude and all, and still care about me. Someone who isn’t always trying to take me down a notch because I’m a woman and shouldn’t be strong.” Her shot missed, bouncing off a joint of his ring finger, and she swore at it and crumpled up another document. “Someone who I like well enough to spend time with outside of having sex, instead of spending all my energy trying to escape them once the sex is over.”
Her third attempt went through his fingers and she shot her hands in the air for the imaginary exultant dance.
Marshall shook his head, amused. He looked over the desk covered with papers and crumpled documents, said blandly, “You get all those things from me and I’m not your boyfriend, so there must be something else you’re after and you just haven’t figured it out yet.”
Then he was back to scribbling because Stan had delivered an ultimatum about the WITSEC reports that were piled up and the goal was to finish today and they had seventeen to go.
They were done with twelve minutes to spare, celebrated at Cavenaugh’s Burgers because they had onion rings to die for … and Mary contemplated Marshall’s question and the inadvertent answer he had given.
He was her best friend. Her only friend. And she needed him right where he was. Besides, there was no reason to think Marshall had feelings for her beyond friendship, anyway.
Then Horst happened and Marshall was shot. There was a stunning conversation while he struggled with pain and his breathing and she had her answer. Not in words, no, but what man fighting to survive a bullet wound takes the time to explain why he was contemplating leaving a partnership some 1080 days strong? Deciding if he was walking away from his only friend?
“You can’t quit,” she said, testing the strength of this connection.
And that single sentence held him with her.
Four
During June 30ths Horrible Date number three of the year, she realized she was spending more energy waiting and watching for the date to fail than she was hoping that something clicked with the man. She wasn’t one to mince words or waste her time and she dropped him off at his apartment with little more than a ‘see you later’, which they both knew meant, ‘never.’
She went to Marshall’s house automatically, found him watching some inane Japanese Game Show and laughing himself hoarse. She kicked off her shoes and sat close enough to rob the rest of his popcorn and for the next forty-five minutes, she relaxed and contemplated his familiar companionship. Everything she was searching for and not finding. Everything she found here and what she had not yet found.
When he had finished his third beer and the show was rolling credits, she said very carefully, “I’ve figured it out.”
“What’ve you figured out?” he returned, brushing popcorn off his jeans.
“I’ve been looking for you.” She was perfectly honest. Candid with herself and, now, with him.
“I’ve been right here,” he said, his speech slightly slurred and slower than normal. “You’ve got me on speed-dial, Mer. All you had to do was ring me up.”
She didn’t mince words, nor waste time-she kissed him right there on the couch amidst stray popcorn kernels. He kissed her back, mouth tasting of Widmer, before his brain caught up and he thought to ask her why. Why this, why now, just … why?
“Ask me in July,” and she kissed him again.
He was uncertain and somewhat baffled while she unbuttoned his shirt. She kept her breath on his face, kissed him coaxingly when he hesitated and by the time her hands were on his jeans, his body had taken over. The windows were thrown wide in his bedroom when she settled over his hips the first time. She loved the way he bridged his back to meet her, the way his hands roved her torso and breasts hungrily, his kisses that were somewhat frantic. She had had many lovers, but he was the first she knew so well before taking into her body. She was too enamored by his raw responses to her to pay attention to her own passion and she hung her head over his, watching, when he climaxed with a strangled cry.
“Don’t make me choose,” he whispered to the shell of her ear. “Don’t force me to choose between this and being your partner.”
“I won’t,” she whispered back. She was waiting for all his questions and wondered if she had an answer for any of them.
By the time he roused the second time, the fan was running to keep the temperature down. He was less frenetic, less raw need, but more quietly intense. Lust had given way to passion. To love. Something she had never accepted or trusted in her bed, but accepted now. Trusted now.
The clock chimed 1 am when they eventually went to sleep. It was July and he was too sleepy to ask anything. It never crossed her mind to get her clothes and sneak quietly away as she had so often done before.
“I love you,” he said when she opened her eyes in the morning.
“I know,” was all she could give him honestly, yet he was happy with just that.
Six
They said nothing to Stan McQueen. Even though they knew he would have loved to know about the change in their relationship, they said nothing. Departmental policy was perfectly clear about fraternization between partners and strictly enforced, so Marshall Mann and Mary Shannon gave nothing away.
Marshall continued just as before, brimming with trivia, and Mary swung through her moods and endured the random details that peppered her day. They argued like siblings on a routine basis and Stan broke it up just as routinely. They spent the majority of their time together as partners anyway, but now there were clandestine rendezvous once or twice a week late at night. They fortified themselves with espresso to cover tiredness the day afterward.
Marshall lived for those nights and never asked for more. He never was petulant, never whined. He kissed her goodbye without rancor. Said hello over coffee and the desk just as smoothly.
Mary lived for those nights, too, but was not willing to have their partnership torn apart if they were discovered. The yearning and subterfuge kept every light on inside of her long after other relationships had darkened and became boring.
They were now two years and going strong.
Their caseloads grew heavier. They juggled them all without a single person lost and a record 67 witnesses made it successfully to trial that year. She low-fived Marshall as he passed her desk when Stan enthusiastically got the numbers from his superior and passed it along to everyone in the department.
Only Jinx noticed that Mary’s moods had calmed and when she caught Marshall in the alleyway between the houses with her daughter’s face in his hands, she knew why.
“Sillies,” she called out the bathroom window. “If you don’t want to be caught, then get in the house and hide in the basement. You know Brandi’s scared of the spiders.”
Jinx never said a thing to Stan, either, even in June when he stopped by the house with papers for Mary to sign and found Marshall at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and his boots off. Jinx dumped a drawer full of papers on the table and was singing Marshall’s praises for helping her sort out her taxes just as the front door opened to admit him
“You’re as convincing a liar as your daughter,” solemnly said Marshall after Stan left.
“Where do you think she learned that skill?” she cheerfully replied, sweeping the papers back into the drawer. “This is kind of fun, hiding you like a fugitive right in plain sight.”
Marshall laughed so hard, he spilled his wine.
After a six-day string of hot July days, when Marshall stayed over because they had central air, Jinx wrestled an extra dresser out of the garage and put in it Mary’s room, empty. She was humored that he always took his dirty laundry home to wash himself.
“Marry this one, honey,” she said to her daughter. “They don’t make men like this.”
Nine
“Why aren’t you dating, Mary?” inquired Bev out of bookkeeping. “You’re a pretty gal; why aren’t you out there?”
“Boyfriends are mostly a lot of work,” she returned. “Been there, done that. It just complicates my already complicated life.” She speared a tomato in her salad. “When I’m done working, I don’t want to be taking care of some man who expects me to be the little woman picking up his socks and fixing his dinner.”
“But…” she looked perplexed. “Don’t you get lonely? Don’t you want to go out to movies and get flowers…”
“Oh, God, the romantic drivel.” Mary laughed, but irritation gave it a harsh edge. “I spend nearly 16 hours a day with Marshall hiding troubled people, and my mom and ditzy sister live with me. How in the hell can I get lonely when I’m never alone?” She pointed her fork at the other girl. “Women need to learn they don’t need a man to keep them happy. With 13 million sex toys out on the market, a woman doesn’t even need a man for a good time-she can get it herself.” She was annoyed enough to dump the rest of her salad and snap the lid back on her steel coffee cup. “Laura Schlessinger has a book out called, ‘10 Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives’ and I think it should be required reading for every girl above age fourteen.”
Backpedaling now. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”
“Not mad. Just irritated that my personal life should be anyone business. Kindly don’t make it yours.”
She swung herself into the hallway … and there was Marshall at Conference Room A with two folders in one hand, his coffee in the other. His eyes did not quite meet hers.
Mary Shannon never evaded trouble. She took a slightly deeper breath and came straight to him.
“How much did you hear?” she asked quietly.
“Enough.” His tenor was steady, but his gaze was on the face sheet of the folders. “Which one of these do you want to intake, the Ebbeson family or Mr. Craig, who’s a bomb maker?”
“You understand why I had to say those things.” She took one file from him, flipped it open to glance at it and then looked in his face. “No one here can find out. They’ll-”
“-I know,” he said somewhat curtly. “Just … let it go.”
“I know I hurt your feelings,” she murmured. “Let’s take these files on a ride along and we can talk over some-”
“No.” Direct. He took the file back from her without malice, dumped his coffee in the water fountain. “Just leave me be for a while. I’ll be fine.”
“Marshall…”
He looked at her finally; face impassive even if his eyes were not. She fell silent, pricked.
“Leave me alone.” Wounded beneath that frozen exterior. “I just need to grind my gears for a while and then I’ll be fine.” He intercepted her protest with a lifted finger, “But I won’t be fine if you keep pushing-let me walk away.”
She let him walk away.
He was gone for most of the rest of the afternoon and she stayed behind in the office and caught up on administrative duties. She was under Stan’s fingernails, firing overdue emails to various places like missiles, updating witness files, purging records and generally getting a lot done while making the whole office tense. Stan intercepted Marshall at the APD office downstairs as he was coming in.
“Whatever the hell just happened, can you please undo it?”
Marshall quirked his sideways smile, said calmly, “I didn’t see a fireball roll into the heavens from this side of town, so …”
“Only because it was invisible.
“Half the time the world is ending,” he called over his shoulder.
He was calm and she was quiet. He flipped the same two files open on the desk and leaned on his knuckles over them.
“I think we should take Mr. Craig because he’s facing seven counts and if anyone is going to crack and go on the lam, it’ll be him. It’ll take our experience to nail him when he makes a break for it.”
“Good call.” She looked up as Stan keyed himself in. “Pass the Ebbeson family off to another team-we’ll take Mr. Bomber.”
He was home less than forty minutes, just long enough to take a shower and drink a beer, when the phone rang.
“Let me take you somewhere,” Mary said.
“We don’t need to talk about this,” he said somewhat wearily. “I know why you said those things in front of the office staff. If Stan gets wind of things, he’ll be forced to do something he doesn’t want to do. We’re saving ourselves.” He added more quietly, “We’ve been together for six years. I’m counting on you to have the balls to tell me if you’re not happy and want out of this. Like you said, a woman doesn’t need a man anymore to make her happy or show her a good time.”
Silence on her end.
“Get dressed, Marshall,” she said. “I’m coming to pick you up.”
“I don’t want to fight with you.”
“So please don’t argue now,” she said calmly. “Get dressed.”
She picked him up, drove thirty miles north to the Blue Moon Theater and bought the popcorn.
“A chick flick?” he said incredulously. “This is even a horrible one, according to the critics and you hate chick fli-”
“-Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”
Fine was not quite the right word, because as soon as the lights dimmed, she had her fingers on his belt buckle in the back row of the nearly deserted theater. He protested, fumbled with her hands until he encircled her wrists.
“I lied to Bev,” she said, breathy and ticklish in his ear. “There are some things a dildo just doesn’t do. It doesn’t squirm and get breathless and pull on the headboard until it creaks. It can’t lay you over the hood of a truck, virgin slow.” Belt undone, button unsnapped. “It doesn’t gasp erotic things, or murmur gentle profanities telling me how it feels in response to what I’m doing.” Fingers through the fly, pulling him free from the jockeys. “Sit back and enjoy the movie, Marshall, because I certainly am.”
He did not see much of the movie. They necked like teenagers in the back row and he had her bra off beneath her shirt before ten minutes had passed. The love scene had nothing on theirs, petting heavily, nearly undone. He grit his teeth when she went down on him, rocking into the furnace of her mouth helplessly. He had never climaxed so hard as he did then, vision swirling to black, his hands tight on the armrests.
She kissed him when she came up, the salty-sweet tang of himself in her mouth.
“You’re the most uncomplicated thing in my world,” she whispered. “You’re not amongst the ten stupid things that I’ve done to mess up my life.”
He held her tightly, wordlessly, for a few minutes before saying, “Let’s get out of here.”
He drove and stopped by a local Safeway unexpectedly, came out with a bouquet of flowers. She smiled and inhaled their perfume … then batted him very gently on the head with them.
“Idiot man.”
“We’ll see if you’re still calling me that after I’ve gone down on you for an hour.”
Ten
Three witnesses in a row came under gunfire that year and the U.S. Marshals service intercepted every one of them. A bullet in the third incident caught Mary just below the ribcage, and Marshall had her down in the gravel beside the pavement with his palm pressed on the wound so hard that she was swearing six kinds of hell at him.
“Keep yelling at me,” he said. “It tells me you’re still alive.”
The paramedics took over in fifty-two minutes and after a fast ambulance ride, surgery, and two pints of blood, she was fine. Or as fine as what passed for Mary Shannon confined to a hospital bed. She had every nurse and orderly rubbed the wrong way by the time Marshall coasted in with his jacket gone and his shirt as rumpled as if he’d taken a header off the edge of the highway.
“Did you get him?” she demanded.
“I got him and kicked his ass,” replied Marshall. “Then I kicked his ass for you, too.” Next, more gloomily, “I think Stan is going to put a letter of reprimand in my file over it.”
“Your first one,” she said dryly, contemplating her five reprimand letters. “My, you’re growing up.”
The injury sidelined her for two weeks. Marshall was known to show up at her house with pie at 1:20 in the afternoon and stay for an hour rattling off everything going on at WITSEC. The meringue wilted in summer heat because he didn’t eat it fast enough.
Twelve
A witness died in summer, but not for lack of protection by Marshall. She was the oldest witness in the program and had been in protected status for 32 years. For 20 of them, she had lived with a combination of heart disease and diabetes, but it was cancer that finally killed her. Marshall stood amidst the bedroom of knick-knacks and embroidery and newspapers to say goodbye. Hospice services had enabled her to stay in her cluttered little house to the very end.
He was noticeably silent on the ride home. She stayed the night without question, but was discerning enough to just hold him. He was calm and thoughtful the next day and disappeared at 2 pm for an appointment with a lawyer.
“Sign this,” he said to her that evening. It was a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care. “My Will is all set, but this hasn’t been done.”
“Marshall-.”
“Don’t string me out with tubes and wires and interventions,” he interrupted. “When it’s time to go, you’ve got to let me go.”
Silence.
“You’d better be waiting for me on the other side.”
“I’ll be building us a house in heaven,” he assured her with a crooked smile.
“Or plotting in hell,” she corrected and nudged him with an elbow. “You-n-me? We can take over.”
“Bring dynamite,” he said cheerfully.
When he lay with her that night, he was silent, pleading with her uneasiness with his hands, his eyes, the hot kisses between her thighs that crazed her. She responded with a fierce possessiveness that hadn’t been in his bed for several years.
Sixteen
He didn’t feel well in the spring. She had never done the worried girlfriend role and she did not start now. They kept the fast schedule as they always had, managing twenty-two witnesses apiece. He lost weight very gradually over a three-week span of time, but she never noticed this, either. The largest criminal trial in New Mexico was ramping up and they had the star witness in their pocket.
Marshall was slow up the courthouse steps on July the 17th and she thought nothing of it, too busy confronting Mr. Kamm’s shifty lawyer. The trial was long and boring. He doodled on a notepad and she tapped her fingers impatiently against her badge. When the verdict came in, she wanted to celebrate, but Marshall begged off and went home. Mary went out with Dershowitz and McQueen instead and didn’t drag in until 1 am.
“I don’t feel very good,” he complained in the morning when she came to pick him up.
“You whine every morning when it’s 6:20,” she replied, though she knew she was usually the one to complain.
She pulled into the driveway of Caleb Demrose’s house in a shower of gravel, but Marshall just sat in the seat. She was clear around the nose of the GMC before she noticed and she jerked his door open, then halted her tirade. He was pale and sweaty, hands in his lap, and merely rolled his head sidelong against the headrest to look at her.
“I don’t feel good,” he said simply, unable to swing his leg out of the truck.
“Jesus Christ, Marshall, you’re white as death,” she said, a hand against his face, “you can’t be blowing fuses when we’re trying to work. Why didn’t you tell me you were really sick, as in, ‘Goddammit, Mary, I’m sick!’”
“I canna stop it, Kept’ain, she’s…” but he couldn’t finish his trademark Scotty quip because he ran out of breath. His eyes were frightened, though his expression was stilled. “My chest hurts,” he whispered. “It’s hard to breath.”
She resnapped his seatbelt, unfastened the top buttons of his shirt. “I’m driving you to the ER right now.”
“Yes,” he agreed and that frightened her more than a wealth of words.
“How do I get you the fastest help?” she said as the Emergency Room door came in view.
“Tell them it’s a heart attack.”
“Please don’t be having a heart attack, Marshall. You’re too young to be having a heart attack.”
“I’m over fifty-five. Heart attacks are common.”
“No, you’re not having a heart attack.” She said it as if she should be obeyed.
A patient presenting with cardiac symptoms did indeed get prompt attention and the badge she flashed and the one he wore guaranteed the best of the best amongst the staff. They would have thrown Mary Shannon out of the cubicle if they had been less focused on him. There were vital signs and six vials of blood drawn and ECG strips and an enormous X-Ray machine and two physicians rattling off orders until a third from Cardiology joined them-she was petrified, but Marshall watched her with eyes that showed no fear at all now.
He was long past fear. All that was left was her face and the agony that pinned him.
“His blood pressure is elevated, the ST intervals elongated.” The Cardiologist spoke briskly. “He’s in sinus tach with a couple of ectopic beats. If this is an MI, only the cardiac enzymes are going to tell us. We’ll have to wait for-”
“He’s not talking,” interrupted Mary. “Marshall is a talker-he fell silent twenty minutes ago.”
The doctor glanced down at his patient, really saw him. “Anyone think to get Mr. Mann out of pain?”
Two milligrams of IV Dilaudid later and Marshal’s eyes were hazy, his speech slurred. His hands were open for the first time in hours, fingers lax through the bar of the side rail holding hers. Stan McQueen had pulled up a chair and the overhead lights illuminated the sweat on top of his head. Marshall crawled his other hand through the side rail and held Stan’s on the other side and the older man raised no objection.
“Good news,” said the Cardiologist thirty minutes later. “It’s not his heart, but the blood work tells us he’s got some muscle damage somewhere. Has he done anything particularly strenuous in the past weeks?”
“Marshall? Hell no,” said Mary. “Wait … a fender bender a little over three weeks ago, but it-”
The Physician in charge of Radiology popped through the curtain.
“Hello, Dr. Hunter. I think I have the answer to the problem. Mr. Mann has a rib dislocated off the sternum and double pneumonia.” He looked at first Stan, then Mary. “The dislocated rib is the cause of the mid-sternal pain that is mimicking a heart attack and causing the muscle cell death. The pneumonitis is aggravating everything else.”
“Oh God, we thought it was serious,” said Stan.
“It is serious,” corrected Dr. Hunter, “but it’s treatable.” He glanced at his colleague. “I’ll get a gram of Ancef going IV.”
“I’ll get a team from physiotherapy to get his rib back in.” He glanced at Stan and Mary. “You’ll have to step out of the room, I’m afraid. This takes quite a bit of manipulation and hurts like hell.”
When the doctors scattered to give orders, Mary kissed Marshall over the top of the side rail and Stan McQueen never batted an eye.
“Did you hear all of that, doofus?” she said.
“I’m not dying.”
“Not yet, but I might kill you later for giving me heart problems!”
Mary did not kill him later, because when the three men left his cubicle after snapping Marshall’s rib back in place, they were sweating and shaking out their hands as if they’d just dug a twenty foot trench, six feet deep. Marshall was pale and abjectly silent and the fingers she gingerly held were tremulous. He never said a word about what had been done to him and she did not ask. By the time the nurse arrived with a small bag of antibiotics, he was asleep.
She took him home after 8 hours of observation, tucked him into bed. She had never done the hovering girlfriend role, but she did it now-she brought everything into the room he could possibly need and was searching for a bell so he could call for her instead of shouting.
“Quit,” he said tiredly. “Just lie down here with me. That’s all I need.”
Nineteen
“Why didn’t you ever ask me to marry you, Marshall?”
He wasn’t surprised at the question. They were driving 165 miles to pick up a witness and Mary always hatched intense conversations in a vehicle so she could have an excuse to not always have to look him in the eye. So she had something to do with her hands. He suspected it was also because it didn’t permit her to flee the scene, either.
He was glad of the long drives for just this reason.
“It would have blown our covert relationship, don’t you think? Some big shiny diamond on your hand?”
“Oh, you so wouldn’t have been able to buy some big shiny diamond,” she scoffed.
“I would have, but then you wouldn’t have worn it.”
She thought about it for 1/8th of a mile.
“Probably not. I’d bend the setting punching some idiot while trying to get information out of him.”
“So I should put a steel ball bearing in a ring setting for you instead? Cool!”
“Jackass.” But she was laughing.
He let a mile run beneath the tires.
“I wanted to leave you free to go,” he said without looking at her-the surest way to get her to glance at him. “If I left you free, then you would never feel the need to fight to get away.” He caught her eye, briefly. “I hoped you’d stay as long as the door was always open, so I always left it open.”
She said nothing. He could tell she was gritting her teeth. He could also tell she was blinking too quickly, even behind her sunglasses. Both indicators of Mary Shannon fighting back tears, because she did not do the weepy girlfriend tripe.
“That’s one of the things I love about you,” she eventually offered. “You always understand.” She glanced his way. “But do you wish it was different?”
It was his turn to be rattled. It was another mile before he answered thoughtfully.
“I used to, because I grew up with the thought that I’d marry and have kids. I don’t … think that way anymore.” He threw a glance to her, was surprised when she caught it. “We are what we are and I’m glad for what we have. How many cops do you know that end up with failed marriages because they’re too tight with their partners, but they can’t make a life with their partner either? We’ve been partners for nineteen years and lovers over sixteen.” He watched a billboard squirt by advertising new cars with 0% financing. “We’re one in a million, Mary. One in a million. I wouldn’t trade that away for anything.”
She never spoke of it again.
Twenty-one
“What do you mean, you want to slow down?”
They were in the corner office, a place they had acquired when the WITSEC building was remodeled in 2025 and Stan McQueen retired. It was his final act before he turned his position over to his replacement, to move his best team into private quarters and away from the junior Investigators.
It was also closest to the coffee machine and break room, a fact which Mary often reminded Stan when the building was reworked.
“I want a day off during the week,” replied Marshall.
“And give the rookies six of our families? Every one of our witnesses is ours because they’re in the most danger, Marshall. Any in particular you’d like to get bumped off, or is this a turkey shoot?”
He looked at her, blandly, waiting out the tirade. It took her less than three minutes, because when Marshall didn’t fight back, it genuinely meant something. She perched her hip on the side of the desk they shared.
“Why do you want to slow down?” she asked more quietly.
“I’m tired,” he replied just as softly. “We’ve been at this for a long time and we keep a pace that not even the fresh paint through the door can manage-and they’re thirty or more years younger than you.”
“Yeah,” she scoffed, “and they’re not us.”
“No.” Softly, but proudly. “They’re not us. There’s not a team west of the Mississippi that has our record and Kelly and Mac only have us by 2%.”
“They probably cheat,” she huffed.
“They do not cheat,” he corrected. He cocked back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head. “Mac is just as hell-bent as you are and Kelly is as neurotic about the details like I am. They’re you and I, only flipped.”
“So,” she redirected. “Why do you want to slow down and will you kindly tell me the truth?”
“I told you-I’m tired.” He leaned his forearms across the slew of papers she’d scattered on the desk. “I go to bed tired, I wake up tired. I’m sleeping enough hours, but I’m still tired. This isn’t a ‘need more sleep’ kind of tired when even the weekends don’t revive me.” He fidgeted with his hands. “And I … hurt a bit.”
She took the pencil she’d been fiddling with and laid it across the top of his hand, the simple gesture they fell back to in lieu of touching physically in the office and giving themselves away.
“What do you mean, you hurt? Where? When did this start?” She never raised her voice, but all her alarm bells were ringing.
He answered just as quietly, but looked at the desk of papers instead of in her face-a fact she instantly noticed.
“It’s been creeping up on me for a few years now. My back hurts every day, my shoulder blade where that fractured bullet sits.” He opened and closed his hands, watching his fingers. Mary watched them too, wary. “My fingers ache all the time. Doctor thinks I have arthritis starting up and all this paperwork aggravates it. I hate Mondays for more reasons than usual.” He glanced up at her, finally. “I’m getting old, Mary.”
“I am too, but I’m not letting it slow me down.”
He said nothing, merely waited.
“Okay.” She was calm, businesslike, adjusting her mental picture. “I’ll speak to Parker, tell him we want to step back a day.”
“Wednesday,” Marshall said. “I already spoke with him.”
“Without talking to me first?”
“I have to slow down.” He looked at her. “And you love me, so you’ll support what I need.”
She paused, because she didn’t say it often and it was therefore automatically weighted, “I do love you. And I’ll support what you need.”
When she drove him to his house late that night, she sat down with all his prescriptions and physicians instructions over the last year and read every one. When he brought her a beer and sat in the wing chair while she read, she noticed the gray in his sideburns and temple more than usual. The laugh lines around his eyes were deeper.
“I’m just getting older,” he soothed when she crawled into his lap and huddled on a shoulder. “I can’t keep that pace anymore. It’s breaking me down. Most folks in law enforcement retire after twenty years, Mer, and we’re still at it.”
“Can we not talk about this?”
“Okay.” He smoothed a hand down her back, traced her bra strap. “Can we go to bed instead?”
“I thought you were tired,” she chided.
“Not that tired.”
He said nothing about how she was changing. Mentioned nothing about the gray in her hair, the way her breasts hung, the veins more prominent in her legs. The fact that she forgot simple things and squinted at 12-point typeface and popped Tylenols all day. She got lost driving the south side of Albuquerque last month and had locked herself out of her house four times.
She was beautiful as always to him. And aging or not, his body always responded eagerly to her.
Twenty-four
Jinx Shannon died on July 7. She was sitting in her favorite club enjoying a wealth of attention as always when she slumped off of the barstool. The man closest caught her, thinking this was just a fun diversion by the fiery elderly woman … but her pulse was erratic and she was unconscious.
She never woke. Marshall hit 86 mph on the highway to the hospital, but all the lights and sirens in the world could not get Mary to her mother before she died. They performed advanced CPR for thirty-eight minutes before the MD called it off.
“A ruptured aneurysm, more than likely,” said the ER doctor. “She should have responded to the amount of pharmaceuticals we used but … nothing. That indicates a major incident either in the brain or in the blood. We will be able to tell you more after an autopsy. I am very sorry for your loss. There are a few papers we need you to sign…”
Mary looked at Marshall, stunned, her brain still trying to process what had just happened.
“She’ll sign whatever you need, Doctor,” he said calmly. “Can we just have a minute with her mother?”
“Of course. Take all the time you need.”
Mary had seen death before. Grisly deaths, not-so-grisly deaths … deaths she’d been party to, deaths she had caused herself. None were like this. None brought this silence within her head. The absence of every internal dialogue, every random thought about events of the day. She stood beside the body staring down at a stranger, unable to say anything, do anything.
Marshall was not immobilized, however, and he laid his left hand on Jinx’s forehead very gently. A gesture so like a benediction that it brought her from the silent distance of shock. She took her mother’s hand, felt the faint warmth that remained. Marshall pulled a chair close, pressed her into it.
“You have about ten minutes,” he quietly said. “Stan just texted me-they’ve located Brandi and she’s being brought in by a squad car.”
“Hysterical, no doubt.”
“She doesn’t know yet. She’s knows it’s bad, but not that she’s gone.”
“Okay.” She was calm. Controlled. The steadfast training of a U.S. Marshal fully operational. A trait she depended on now more than ever. “Let me know when she’s in the hallway.”
The hospital scene with Brandi was difficult, dramatic, and desperate. Mary handled it with exactly the amount of tenderness and strength required, a bulwark that her sister leaned on in times of trouble, great and small. It was hours before it was over, the papers were signed, Jinx’s personal effects gathered, and Brandi safely escorted home to her current boyfriend.
“Come home with me,” Marshall said, sliding behind the wheel.
“Not tonight,” she said, leaning her head against the side of the truck.
“Not for that,” he returned, his voice mildly wounded. “Just so you’re not … not home around all of her things.”
“Marshall,” she sighed, “I need to go home especially to be around all of her things. My mother was the drama-her things weren’t.” She looked at him, saw the sharp scrutiny that he fixed on her. “Trust me on this. I need to go home.”
He took her home. She brought in the mail, dropped some flakes into the goldfish tank, pulled the kitchen garbage can out next to the door to remind herself to take the big can to the curb in the morning. Marshall made toast, then boiled water for tea. By the time Mary ran out of simple puttering tasks, he had a plate of buttered bread and two steaming cups. It was the first thing she’d eaten since 7 am.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said eventually. She had the water running when she swung her head around the doorframe. “Don’t sit there-come on.”
He waited until she was through shampooing her hair and conditioning it before touching her and even then, just laid his hands gently on her shoulders.
“I won’t break,” she said.
“Sadly, no you won’t.”
She hugged into his embrace, took note of the fact that he let her stand in the spray of hot water while he got chilled standing out of it. He always put her first, even when there was no crisis. She tilted her head, intention unmistakable, and he kissed her obligingly. Then again, because she jerked her chin at him the way she did when she was bossy.
A third, thoughtfully. The fourth, slower still, wet and open.
“I didn’t come here for this,” he whispered into her mouth.
“You always come here for this.”
“No.” But then he rephrased when she chuckled against him, “Okay, yes, but that’s not what I came here for today.”
“It’s why I brought you home.”
“Mary-”
“Hush. Just do what I want.”
Marshall disliked shower sex as a rule. The prelude to sex, yes. Actual sex, no. There wasn’t enough room, it was too slick to properly pick her up, and Marshall had trouble picking her up on good days let alone in the confines of a shower with both of them slippery as seals.
But the warm-up … yes. And after a few more seconds of him hesitating, his body was responding to the wet slide of her skin against his, the half-tender and half-fierce grip of her hands in his hair. She was good for just the kissing while his erection filled, then he tucked between her thighs without penetrating, teasingly.
“Bad boy,” she said.
“Your bad boy.”
“My favorite bad boy.”
They went to bed damp and uncaring. Marshall turned her on her back and drug her to the edge bodily, a hand beneath a knee to open her, and then he was in-hard and fast-the aggressive way she liked out of him when the day was harsh.
“Oh God,” she groaned, fingers wrapped around his forearms, her grip guiding him on how much forcefulness she wanted. “Just like … stay just like…”
He had learned to be a good lover with her. Learned the control he never had as a young man on rare dates. He thought about other things, work and his car registration almost due and how many gallons of milk were in his fridge, instead of the woman in his arms. The only one in his heart. And he gave her what she wanted and needed, because that’s what he did.
He knew she climaxed by the nails that bit into him and the howl of bliss, but hung on for a handful more thrusts to be sure she wasn’t just skipping like a stone through several in a row. She told him she was done with all the little signals that longtime lovers develop and only then did he let his mind focus. Let everything he felt for her, his longing and need for her, free to run. She held him tight, met the urgency of his kisses, listened to the sound through his chest as pleasure found him.
She let him hold her in the aftermath because she knew he loved to. He turned on the TV because he knew she loved something for her mind to focus on. For a long time, there was just the tangle of their embrace and the late news.
“My mother sure made a mess of her life,” she said to his neck.
“It was a fun mess most of the time.”
“She did have fun.” She peered sidelong at him. “Played hard, crashed and burned hard.”
“Reminds me of you.” He twitched at the poke she gave him. “You got some of your best features from your mom.”
“Be grateful I didn’t pick up the Be Drunk Daily feature from her.”
He pulled away enough to see her face clearly, smoothed a damp lock aside.
“Your mother loved you.”
“Yeah.”
“And she loved me because I made you happy. But most of all,” he said solemnly, “she was proud that you were strong and sensible and savvy enough to be a U.S. Marshal. You’re the person she was most proud of.”
“My mother had nothing to do with me being a U.S. Marshal,” she said somewhat irritably.
“She knew that, too. She told me that as soon as you got away from her, your life became something wonderful and it took all of her strength to stay away and let you go on to become someone. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, that’s when she came and moved in with you.” He was very solemn. “She wanted to watch one of her children be successful when she never seemed to be able to. She was a wreck beside the road of life, she said to me once, but as long as you were that road running straight as an arrow, she was okay with being a wreck beside the road.”
She wept finally, fourteen hours after her mother collapsed. It was July 8.
Twenty-six
“Jesus.”
She sat down, stared at him.
“I know this is going to happen someday, Marshall, but … now? You want to retire now? You’re only sixty-five and you were aiming for sixty-eight.”
“I’m ready,” he said softly. “My hands are starting to shake. I’m due next year for my twenty-yard proficiency and I know I can’t pass it.”
“You know Parker will let that stupid gun test slide, Marshall. This job is more than being able to put a two inch spread in a target at twenty yards.”
“I’m not willing to carry a gun in this kind of job when I know that I haven’t got the goods anymore,” he said somewhat sternly. “If I’m not solid behind this badge, then it’s time to hang it up.” His eyes softened. “I have to give it up before they take it from me, because I couldn’t bear it if they take it. It’s time for me to retire and I’m ready.”
“Well I’m not,” she answered emphatically.
“You don’t have to retire with me.”
She blinked at him, said slowly, “You don’t expect me to retire with you?”
“No, why would I? You can stay on until you’ve had enough.”
It was breathtaking, heart stopping, to consider going on without him. For several moments, Mary let the chill of that wash through her. She remembered the terror the first time he had been shot and she feared he would die. And she didn’t even need him, love him, then.
“No.” Fingers over her eyes to hold back treacherous tears. “No, I can’t do this without you. I won’t go on with some other idiot partner-I’ve already got your idiocy properly trained. They tried to re-partner us three times after Stan retired and only gave it up because our success number crashed, you almost got killed, and I nearly strangled my new associates or they, me.
“If it’s time for you to step down, then it’s,” she paused, struggled to speak the words, “it’s time for me to retire, too.” She looked at him. “We’re partners and we’ve been in step for twenty-six years.”
She saw his undisguised tears and realized how much it had cost him to give her permission to stay. How even over their span of years, he still was braced for her to step away and go on without him. Still expecting her to leave. Her soul felt trampled.
“I only work with you,” she said softly, leaning her face so close that if anyone spotted them, their secret would be throughout the office and clear to WITSEC Headquarters in less than fifteen minutes. “You’re the only partner I want, the only man I want. Pick the date and I’ll retire with you.”
His voice held the barest tremble, but his words were perfectly clear as he made the decision for them both.
“Next July. We have one more year.”
After she left the office for the records archive, Marshall put his face in his hands, grateful he did not have to pressure her. Mary’s hearing was failing in her right ear and nerve damage from the single bullet she had taken was impairing her coordination. She held the wall in the shower when she rinsed the shampoo out because of dizziness and the last time she had run down a subject on foot, she’d fallen so badly that she cracked her right tibia.
The GPS in the truck kept her from getting lost amongst familiar city streets every day.
Twenty-seven
“I’m going to sell my house,” he said in February.
“What? Why?” she demanded almost on autopilot.
“I want to move up into the hills,” he replied, “buy a ranch house out so far that I can’t be found.”
She glanced sidelong at him, noticed he was driving with both hands on the wheel. His hair was salt and pepper, his whiskers in the morning before he shaved completely gray.
“I can still find you.”
“Wouldn’t be hiding from you, now would I?” he chuckled.
They passed the market on Seventh Street, then the new JC Penny on eighth.
“Is it hard to get a realtor and sell a house?”
“No, but I’m going to sell my house myself. The paperwork is standard for all home sales. No magic involved. Realtor’s just like to take 12% of your profit for filling out the same thing you can fill out.”
She looked at him.
“Let me guess, you’ve read up on this?”
“You know your Marshall.”
She grinned, amused, then said seriously, “You want to sell my house, too?”
He fired a surprised glance her way as he took the corner onto Arline Drive.
“You don’t have to sell your house just because I’m selling mine.”
“I want to. Brandi is on her own and the place is full of memories. I’ll sell it and throw in with you.” She grinned. “You can buy a bigger ranch house back in the hills so far that we can’t be found.”
“So you’re planning to live in sin with me, Mary Shannon?” he chided.
“Haven’t we always been?” The wind tousled her hair through the open window. She colored it now and it was golden as summer wheat.
He pulled abruptly into the alley off of Arline, parked behind the pub next to the garbage bin. Empty alcohol bottles were loaded in cases four high to be carted away. He scooted on the bench seat and she scooted automatically to meet him, the four-wheel drive stick tangling their shins just as he got his fingers in the sunglow of her mane.
Four minutes later, she said, “I am not getting naked on this bench seat at ten in the morning, Mr. Mann.”
“I remember when you used to.”
“And I remember you hit your head on the roof.”
He grinned, blue eyes lively. “I don’t remember hitting my head. I think I was … distracted.” He kissed her again, lingeringly. “Living in sin, hm? Anyone ever tell you that sinners make the best Saints?”
After work, she drove him ten miles up McCarney Creek and shucked out of her clothes in the front seat of the GMC. Their bodies were slower, but the depth of passion remained the same. She made sure he did not hit his head on the roof.
Marshall put his house up for sale and it was gone in two weeks. He put everything in storage and lived in a crappy WITSEC apartment, though Mary Shannon mostly snuck him home with her. Marshall sank $1500 of new paint, new fixtures, and general updating into Mary’s house and it sold in a month. They were enthusiastically homeless together and fellow employees accused them of sleeping in the office because they looked a bit unkempt because of it.
He found a rambling ranch style home with a view of the valley below and bought it on the spot because Mary did not care. He brought a large moving truck up with a crew to unload his things and took only the company truck to move hers, because Mary did not keep anything except her clothes and a scrapbook or two. There were his dishes in the cupboards, his towels in the bathroom, his washer and dryer, his books ... Mary sold everything out of the house before it went to the new buyer and had the rest taken away to Goodwill Industries.
“I have what I need,” she said when he anxiously questioned her about it in the front yard. She loaded him in the WITSEC truck and left the sale to the men hired to do it without a backward glance. “There’s nothing there that I need to hang onto. Everything I want is right here.”
She took him to the pie shop, because he loved pie. His dominant hand shook while he ate and he was so used to the tremors that he did not notice them anymore. Mary had never noticed them quite as much as today.
“They’re planning a retirement party,” he said on the seventh of July.
“No, just no,” she said crossly. “I hate parties and every single one of them know it!”
“It’s not for you-it’s for me.” His expression was bemused. “I love parties.”
“Oh, in that case, I’ll come.”
It was a wild party in a bar with loud music. Albuquerque Police Department sent part of a squad, including Bobby Dershowitz, now gray himself. Stan McQueen came despite a stroke slowing him down.
Marshall wore a party hat and every sign, every card, the cake, the decorations on the table said, ‘Happy Retirement Marshall!’ Handwritten after his name were the words, ‘and Mary.’ The block lettering was his, because he was the only one who could get away with it and the department knew it. She cuffed him on the arm when she spotted it and Stan howled with recognition at that playful slap.
Everyone danced, except Stan, who was encumbered with a cane and Mary, who refused to dance as a rule. She wished her mother had lived to see this day, the tall rangy-boned man with the crazy hat sideways on his head, dancing like a loose piece of string with a whole department of fellow crazies.
But Mary surprised them all after enough beers had gotten beneath her belt, because she took to the floor with Marshall and danced to some wild tune with him. And he was zany enough to waltz part of it now and then, just to make everyone laugh, and Mary went along because he was her partner and she was used to crazy.
“Stan,” said Parker thoughtfully, watching the way his ex-Inspectors danced; the steps that matched, the press of their hips, the automatic segue into a waltz and then back out again that was so smooth it had to be well practiced. “How long have those two been intimate?”
“Oh,” said Stan. “I think it started about nine or ten years before I retired and you took over.”
“Why didn’t you tell me they were fraternizing?” he demanded incredulously. “You know that is strictly against the rules!”
Stan sipped his soda, because he was on medication that precluded drinking alcohol. He was so happy on this occasion that he did not need any extra buzz.
“Because it didn’t matter. They kept it out of sight and their success rate climbed three years in a row and remained consistent. How can you split up a team like that and call it justified? You tried to break up their partnership a few times; do you remember the fallout from that?” He grinned at the other man. “You never suspected a thing. That’s how good they were at hiding in plain sight.”
He cheered with everyone else when the dance ended a Marshall kissed her fleetingly. Mary rolled her eyes and shoved him away. Marshall laughed and perched a hip on the bar stool next to Stan.
“Good enough for you?” he said. “That’s about the most public display of affection you’ll see.”
“Good enough for me,” replied Stan, elbowing him. “You’re her best kept secret. She’ll probably never learn how to walk down a street and hold your hand properly, you know.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Marshall was stealing a bite of someone’s cake with a spare fork. “It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s with me.”
“She’s always been with you,” said Stan, downing the last of his soda.
They went to their new home up in the rugged hills overlooking Albuquerque for the first time together and Mary stood staring out over the city lights spilling like jewels on velvet. Marshall hooked his chin over her shoulder, curled his arms around her midsection.
“Pretty?” he asked.
“Absolutely. I’ve never thought of that town as beautiful, but it is from up here.”
“Every light is a diamond,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t wear one, but I bought this house just to give you these every night.”
She hugged his arms tighter, said nothing.
“I’ll marry you if you want,” he said.
“Do you want to?”
He thought about it only an instant and then said very quietly, “No piece of paper from City Hall has ever made any difference in my commitment to you. And I don’t need it to tell me your commitment to me.”
“Then, no.” She turned in his arms, looked wickedly into his eyes. “I’d rather live in sin. With you.”
They made love out on the terrace, beneath starlight. City glow illuminated her above him and he remembered the first time, her hair just as blonde, her eyes just as focused on his face. He gathered her to him, held her hips still an instant.
“I love you,” he said. “I don’t regret this life you’ve chosen for me.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered. She kissed his eyebrow, then the curl of white hair at his temple. “I’ve loved you longer than anything in my life.”
Twenty-eight
He planted a garden and put in flowers. The tremors steadied with a change of medication and the pain in his fingers eased. Sun and rest and the slow pace refreshed him inside and out and then Marshall was getting up at sunrise just as he did when he was a young man. He looked out over the valley protectively, still a Marshal, as if his steady regard was able to protect those below. Coffee curled steam around his face
Mary slept in until he brought her coffee and was frumpy until ten am. He was asleep in her lap by ten pm, her fingers smoothing through his hair, when CSI started and she began ordering the police around from the couch.
She idled for the first time in years and the doctor put her on Neurontin, which eased the nerve pain from the old wound. She could jog to the mailbox and back and did so every day without balance problems. She repainted every room in the house and built a deck. She got dirty in the garden with Marshall and learned more about bugs and weeds than any sane person ought. There was a dirt fight one day that left them breathless and filthy with no one there to break it up until they were exhausted.
She wondered if she would lose her mind with nothing constructive to do … but the following July, Dershowitz phoned with a tentative proposition; he had a person arriving in Albuquerque needing personal protection for a few days. Would either of them be interested in some sideline bodyguard work?
Marshall grinned at her. “Your gun is in the rifle case on the right. The badge is on the top shelf. Use your GPS, because they’re moving streets around all the time down there.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Hell no. I know you can’t leave it completely.” He looked her up and down, this smart savvy blonde still full of fight at age sixty-three. “It’s good for you to kick a little ass now and then.”
“Keeps me from kicking yours around up here,” she chuckled, twining hands through his.
He kissed her, coasted his breath along her face. She closed her eyes, drank in that soft caress that she had enjoyed for twenty-five years.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I know,” he replied, absolutely sure. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
And he always was-and Mary Shannon always came back.
~~~~~~~~~~~
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