Breaking Point
soppingwetpanties
This story is the eighth in the timeline of fifteen Max Pemberton detective stories. You're encouraged to read the stories preceding this one to give you additional background, though this story can stand on its own.
Dedicated to migbird, Max's constant companion.
For those of you who don't know Max, she's a big, sexy police detective with a tough as nails demeanor and a soft center. She follows her heart, and not her head, which usually gets her into trouble with her girlfriends, her boss and the bad guys. In this story she's faced with her biggest foe - herself. Can she make a lifelong commitment to Sky, a junior detective in Homicide?
Here's the breakdown of Max's stories in chronological order:
Maelstrom
Deception
Blindsided
Jackknifed
Tailspin
Crash Landing
Rebound
Breaking Point
Cold Steel (written first, followed by Hot Steel)
Hot Steel
Pink Ice
Betrayal
Loss of Innocence
Revenge is Best Served Cold
To Hell... And Back
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, merchandise, companies, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older.
Chapter One
An Inglorious Death
The screams of the police sirens were deafening, echoing off the corrugated steel walls of Jim Landry's expansive new car warehouse. My lover and fellow police officer Skylar Hobson was still sitting in the driver's seat of a shiny new black Audi that had yet to touch the showroom floor, shivering in my arms, while Lily Chao's killer was lying dead as a doornail not more than two feet from us. He bled out from a massive head wound, thanks to my point-blank kill shot that splattered his brains against the wall. My first shot was made hastily and wounded him in the shoulder. I made him get up, unarmed, then popped him in the head and placed his gun in his hand to bolster my claim of self-defense.
Yeah, I fucking killed him, and I'd do it again if given the chance. There was no room in the world for a piece of shit like him.
When I graduated from the Academy I thought the law created a bright line between what was right and what was wrong. But that was the Academy -- not the real world. Lawyers spent their working lives debating the law. I spent my working life making decisions on what I thought was right, not necessarily according to the letter of the law or following the dictates of "proper" police procedure. I made no apologies to myself, or anyone else when it came to the accuracy of my moral compass.
All I knew at that moment in time was that I wasn't letting that murdering Russian motherfucker leave the warehouse alive that day. Lily's ghost told me so. So I did what I had to do. I executed him in cold blood and felt not an iota of remorse when I pulled the trigger.
The first officers to arrive at the scene were Emil Martinez, one of my colleagues in Vice, and my long-time partner Lesley Groesbeck. Lesley was temporarily assigned to Emil during the pendency of my suspension. I was suspended by my superior, Lieutenant Billie Odette, for disobeying her order to stay away from Lily's murder investigation, which was rightfully being handled by Homicide. I couldn't stay away because Lily told me as she bled out that the shooter was from Bratva, the Russian version of Mafia. No one in the department believed her dying words because Bratva had no reported presence in Cincinnati.
That is, no one except me.
But of course Lily turned out to be right. Sky and I spent countless hours confirming her lead. In the end, we identified Konstantin Kreshnevsky, a member of Bratva, as Lily's killer. Sky went rogue on me and chased after Kreshnevsky on her own, getting herself cornered by the Russian in the new car warehouse. When I got to her she was quaking uncontrollably with fear. It was fortunate I got wind of her extracurricular manhunt and got to her in the nick of time. Sky was still in my clutches, descending into a state of shock, when the police arrived.
"Max!" Lesley called out to me, relieved to find me unharmed. She was my partner and always had my back. I wasn't surprised that she would be the first one to find me.
"Are you OK?" she asked, breathing heavily, her powder blue eyes staring at me.
Then she peered into the car and saw that I was cradling Sky in my arms.
"Is she hurt?" Lesley asked me, her face showing deep concern.
"We're fine," I said, trying to calm Sky in the process. "She had a little scare and needs some air."
That was a massive understatement. She had the scare, literally, of her life, and was in shock. She was about to have her head blown off by a professional hitman wielding a Russian made RSh-12 handgun, the most powerful handgun in the world. No one should ever have to stare down the barrel of an assassin's cannon.
Lesley pointed at the bloodied corpse on the ground, who happened to be missing a good part of his face.
"That's Lily's killer?"
"I'm certain of it," I told her. "Ballistics will confirm it's the same gun that was used to kill Lily," I said confidently, leading her with my eyes to the gun in his hand.
"And you bagged him?" she asked, her question already showing her skepticism for the accuracy of my story, which I had yet to tell.
"I did," I confirmed.
"Jesus Max. So it is Bratva?"
"Sure as you're standing here."
"Odette's going to eat crow," Lesley said gleefully. Lesley and I had a world of respect for Billie, but in this instance she made the wrong call and we were going to rub her nose in it if she didn't acknowledge her mistake.
"I'm going to watch her eat it," I said. It felt good to be right, but it was also cold comfort since Lily was still in an early grave, no matter who did it.
A team of EMT's rushed up to us. One of them draped a blanket around Sky and helped her get up and start walking. Members of the Homicide team followed shortly after and were taking photographs of the crime scene and already marking the position of the body. I watched as Sky was helped into the back of the EMT's van, her face frozen with a lifeless expression.
My history with Sky was complicated. She was a junior member of Homicide and teamed up with me to solve a killing that exonerated Alessandra Caruso, my partner Lesley's lover [ed. note, see
Jackknifed
]. I fell in love with Sky but screwed up our relationship by stepping out on her. Sky hadn't forgiven me, but overlooked my transgression so we could find Lily's murderer. Sky didn't overlook my infidelity because she was going to give me another chance. She did it because she had to prove to her colleagues in Homicide that she was good police, and deserving of a spot as a field investigator, and not just a back-room researcher she seemed destined to become. I helped her prove herself as an excellent, though impulsive, investigator, and had just saved her life.
Like I said, our relationship was complicated.
"I'm riding in the back," I told the EMT. She was kneeling next to Sky taking her vitals. I climbed into the decked-out van. Sky was prone, wrapped in a thermal blanket and quivering. The sound of the beeping of the heart monitor told me her heart rate was way too fast. She looked ashen. I took her hand and squeezed it tight.
"Max... I'm so cold... so cold..." she babbled, almost incoherently. Her eyes looked wild.
"Rest my sweet," I told her, "rest."
I was grateful that I had her, even in this state. She was almost another senseless homicide, a person caught in the crossfire between the Russians and the locals who controlled the turf the Russians coveted.
But that didn't happen. She was my baby and I saved her from certain death.
* * *
I was in the hospital's noisy and crowded waiting room, checking the messages on my phone. It was the first free minutes I had since I figured out Sky was about to be killed. That was twelve hours of hard running without a sip of water. My mind was racing as well. I had just killed someone in cold blood and the woman I loved was slipping into a lifeless trance. This was not a good time in my life.
I had over five hundred unopened e-mails. I'm sure some of them were from Odette asking what the fuck I was doing while I was on suspension and threatening me if I kept pursuing my Bratva hunch. Of course I didn't open her e-mails so I could feign ignorance if I was wrong. I was cursing at my phone when a nurse rescued me from e-mail jail. I knew it was about Sky so I instinctively grabbed his collar.
"Hey," he said, looking at the hand I had on his shirt collar.
"Sorry," I said. "She's my partner."
His face told me he understood why I reacted the way I did. "She's not doing very well," he told me.
That wasn't news to me. She was horribly shaken. She would never be able to forget that feeling, and it would likely to come back to haunt her in the middle of the night. I've felt that way before and had those nightmares. After all, she was in the fucking hospital because of the fright she experienced.
"Where is she?" I asked.
"I'll take you there." Then the nurse paused. The sour look on his face was gone. "I want to thank you for your service."
He must have known I was the officer who rescued Sky. There were police crawling all over the lobby. No one took a shot at one of our own and got away with it. My compadres were all eager to find the scum behind the hitman. I'm sure a good number of them would be tempted to do what I did to Kreshnevsky if they found out who pushed the button.
I followed the nurse and pushed my way through a wall of people, many of whom I knew, to Sky's room. There were two uniformed policemen outside guarding her door. One of them was Martinez.
"Hey Max, so sorry," Emil said. He gave me a hug. He wasn't the huggy type and the gesture was heartfelt.
"Thanks," I said while we were hugging. The other policeman nodded at me. It felt good to have them cover my back and to keep Sky safe. Whoever did push the button wouldn't stop at Sky. She was just a junior cop. Next time it would be someone higher in the chain of command, like me.
"You find those motherfuckers," Emil said, his eyes showing fire. He was right.
"I will, if it's the last thing I do." I wanted those lowlifes bad. But I hoped my words weren't going to be prophetic, and it would be the last thing I'd do. The feeling was creeping in that there was a legit chance I was playing at a level above me, and I'd be cut up in pieces and stuffed in a fifty-five-gallon drum and dropped to the bottom of the Ohio river.
The nurse held the door open for me. There were already bouquets of flowers lined up on the back wall, but no one was in there except for the doctor. It was a large private room, sparsely furnished. The doctor was a forty-ish woman about my height with a frown on her face. Sky was sitting up in bed with headphones on. Her eyes came alive when she saw me.
The doctor intercepted me before I could move closer.
"What in world happened to her?" she asked me. "I've never seen a case like this one. It took an hour and a lot of drugs to get her into a state where you can talk to her. She looks like she's tough, but this really shook her."
