Baltimore 03 - Did You Miss Me?

Ford had been for a day and how he had magically shown up on some lady’s snow-covered lawn.
    He had called Bo Lamar next. The FBI/ATF task force formed to track the source of the assault rifles recovered from yesterday’s raid was moving rapidly. The assault rifles had a connection to organized crime. Specifically a Russian ‘businessman’ named Fyodor Antonov.
    The Bureau had been watching Antonov for a year now, but had never been able to put their hands on the goods to connect with him. Bo would spend most of his morning arranging a warrant and planning a raid on Antonov’s warehouse.
    JD Fitzpatrick had spent the entire night checking out the properties he’d found belonging to Dougs, Douglases, or MacDougals within a two-hour radius of Baltimore. Two hours was how long Doug would have had between coming home from Philly with Pamela and arriving at the alley to attack Isaac Zacharias and Ford Elkhart. It was tedious and time-consuming work, but that’s what detective work was usually like.
    Joseph had told JD about his conversation with Holly the night before, that Kim had told Doug about a possible job, but that he’d need a ‘GC’ to do it. JD was adding that to his rapidly overflowing plate.
    Daphne had called everyone in her world to give them the good news. She’d smiled and laughed and sometimes cried with her family and friends.
    When she’d finished her last call, she’d become abruptly quiet, as if she’d expended all her energy being happy. For the last half hour she’d stared out of her window, deep in thought. He let her have her space, well aware that for the last twenty-four hours she’d had precious little time to herself.
    When she finally did speak, she took him by surprise.
    ‘It was stage one. I was twenty-seven years old.’
    He looked right so hard and fast that he nearly hit a tractor trailer. The trucker blew his horn but Joseph barely heard it. He got back in his lane and drew a breath.
    She hadn’t looked at him, still staring at the passing countryside that he didn’t think she saw at all.
    Stage one. That’s  . . .  the least bad, right? But he couldn’t ask that question.
    Twenty-seven? He hadn’t done the math for some reason. ‘That’s not . . . usual, is it?’ He’d caught himself before ‘normal’ left his mouth. ‘To be diagnosed so young.’
    ‘It’s rare and I certainly wasn’t expecting it. I figured it was something innocent, like a cyst. When he said “cancer” I went into a state of shock.’
    So much so that she’d wandered to her ex-husband’s office. ‘How did you find it?’
    ‘Monthly self-exam . . . that I didn’t do every month because I was twenty-seven. “Old women” in their forties and fifties got breast cancer. But women in their twenties do get it, and when they do it’s usually a lot more aggressive.’
    His heart stuttered at the word. Aggressive . ‘ Was yours?’
    She lifted a shoulder. ‘Could have been a lot worse. I’m still here. I come with an awful lot of baggage, Joseph. I think you need to know that.’
    ‘We all have baggage.’
    ‘Mine still hovers over my head. Anyone who wants to be with me needs to understand that. I’m seven years clear and with every year my chances of dying from something else get better and better. I sometimes get paranoid over the smallest sniffle or bruise, worrying that it’s come back, because if it does . . . that would be very bad.’
    He took a minute to think, to use the logic that normally served him well. But at the moment the fear clawing at his gut was kicking logic out the door. She waited for him to speak, still not looking at him.
    ‘I’ve got a million different thoughts running through my head right now and I’m terrified I’m going to say the wrong one,’ he confessed.
    ‘I don’t think there is a wrong one, Joseph.’
    ‘Yeah, there probably are several wrong ones. The wrong ones would be ones that hurt you. A right one would be one that makes us both feel better.’
    ‘What makes you feel better?’
    ‘That numbers don’t lie. Statistically speaking, I’m more likely to get hurt because I have a dangerous job.’
    She grimaced. ‘That doesn’t make me feel better at all.’
    ‘I just mean that anyone who wants to be with me needs to understand that my job comes with certain risks.’ He cast her a sideways glance and caught her peeking at him from the corner of her eye. ‘Although lately, your job is a helluva lot more