Free Hit and Run by Allison Brennan, Laura Griffin

watched the colors turn vibrant over the horizon as she drained the first beer. The sound of the waves crashing twenty feet from her was soothing. This was her favorite place. She’d miss Diego’s bar if she really did move. While her apartment was a pit, she had the deck and the sound of the water. She needed it, she realized. It kept her sane. The violent lull of the Pacific moving in, moving out, constant, steady, predictable. The tide always came in; the tide always went out, leaving a once messy beach pristine.
    If only life were so predictable, so easy. If only the waves could wash away her mistakes.
    She finished her second beer and put her head on her knees and closed her eyes. She hated feeling sorry for herself, but she was. She had work to do—Jason was counting on her. But she couldn’t get the fire out of her head, or the flash of her gun illuminating Eric Peterson as she shot him three times in the chest.
    He would have killed her and Jason. She’d killed him instead. It didn’t make her feel any better.
    She opened her third beer and sensed someone watching her. She’d picked up her back-up gun at her apartment earlier, but she hesitated. She’d just killed a man and she was thinking of drawing her gun again?
    This was why virtually every police department forced mandatory leave on any officer involved in a shooting. Because you doubted yourself, questioned your decisions, hesitated when hesitation could prove fatal, for you or your partner.
    She glanced over her shoulder and saw a familiar face.
    “How’d you find me?”
    Alex Bishop sat next to her in the sand. “I saw your Jeep in the parking lot. You often come here to sulk.”
    “I don’t sulk.”
    “It’s illegal to drink on the beach.”
    “Arrest me.”
    Instead, he pulled out one of her bottles and opened it. He drained half of it in one long swallow.
    “Now you owe me a beer.”
    He didn’t say anything. The sun was a sliver over the horizon; together they watched it sink. The ocean grew dark while the sky was alive with deep orange, red, yellow. As time passed, the colors turned darker, soothing.
    She wanted to stay here all night.
    Alex said quietly, “Last year, I shot and killed a fifteen-year-old. It was justified. He would have killed my partner. I had no choice. I did everything by the book. But the kid was fifteen. Fifteen,” he repeated, the word bitter as it came out. “I almost quit. I wanted to. The guilt, undeserved, ate me up because I’d killed a kid. It didn’t matter that he was a gang-banger. It didn’t matter that he was wanted for murder, it didn’t matter that he had already fired on my partner and me. All I could think about was that I’d taken his life and who the fuck was I to play a fucking god?”
    When Scarlet first met Alex three weeks ago, she’d looked into his background. Partly out of curiosity, partly because he was lead on a case she’d had an interest in. She’d read about the shooting, and the media fall out. Because Alex was right—he was a kid. It didn’t matter whether it was justified or not, cops were human: you wanted to believe that with a chance, the kid could change.
    “I couldn’t stay in Sacramento. Not with the shit that rained down on me, my department, my boss. My partner only has two years until he can retire early. He took a desk job. I was on mandatory leave for two weeks. When I came back, I knew I couldn’t stay. But I dealt with the fall-out. I took the hits in the media. And in the end, I knew I was a cop. It’s all I ever wanted to be. My dad and brother are firemen. But me, being a cop was in my blood. So I sent out my resume, applied in every department west of the Rockies. And I’m glad, because this is who I am.
    “I still have nightmares about that kid. His name was Jamal Stockton. He had four brothers, two killed in gang warfare, one in prison, and one a wanted fugitive. Father in prison, mother a drug addict. And sometimes I think he knew he was going