Read Dr. O for Free Online

like you."
    "Rather bet on the Black Hawks! It's a safer bet."
    "Don't sell yourself short, handsome. IH just tidy up a few loose ends and meet you later."
    He watched her go, thinking how much help she'd been in both his personal and professional life, and how little he'd given her in return. He wondered why she stayed with him.
     
    Robyn Muro often worried about the man she loved. Swisher was both enigmatic and disturbing, as well as quite easily the kindest "tough guy" she knew. He might be a "blue knight" in many respects, but he was also a black knight, doling out death to those he felt deserved death. An inner turmoil of grief, guilt, and anger had eaten away at his humanity for years now. What such emotions did to the psyche no one knew. Had such an experiment in terror and loss, depression and a life of seeking revenge ever been conducted at a university or in a laboratory? Joe
    Swisher's life on the edge had taken its toll.
    Joe's insomnia had led to more drink, and his drink had led to more confusion and internal struggle. He had turned away from her for support from Hiram's Old World Whiskey. And she didn't like the storm signs.
    They'd talked about it, and he had made promises. But she didn't know if they were promises he could keep.
    Joe was not easily understood. Yet he had no secrets from her anymore, and his motivations were straightforward enough that she should be able to help him. She saw his life as an interrupted journey. He might've done anything in life with his Michael Douglas smile, full baritone voice, and rugged good looks. But all that went by the wayside when Jerrie was so brutally killed. It made for a twisted ending to his life as a boy, and a corrupt beginning to his life as a young man. Now his every action was predicated upon that horrifying event, a multilation killing. And now Thorpe was knowingly rubbing his face in it, not allowing him to flee, forcing him to obsess on it and confront the ugliness. What would that do to Joe? Robyn feared it might become a sickness, become like carrion to feed upon continuously for the rest of his life....
    Maybe... just maybe she could help him, and maybe not.
    The warm shower water soothed her nerves. She al-ways washed the cop off her before leaving the precinct each evening.
    "He'll bounce back. This thing with Stavros has just got to him," Peggy Olson, a fellow policewoman and friend, assured her. They stepped from the shower, draping themselves in towels and heading toward their lockers. "We've all hated people we've gone after.
    Doesn't mean anything."
    "Yeah, true. But with Joe, it runs deep," she said.
    "It's just not like any other job."
    "The adrenaline high, I know."
    "Adrenaline and hatred can keep you alive, kiddo."
    She rushed to finish. She was meeting Swisher outside in her civies in five minutes. She'd do a makeover at her place, later. Something had occurred to her as she'd spoken with Peggy "Peg-leg" Olson, three years a sergeant detective herself. She wanted to share her idea with Swish, but she wasn't certain how to approach him with it.
    During the drive to her place, he was silent when she brought up the issue with him, saying, "Joe, you know, whoever did Stavros has nothing to do with—you know—what happened to your sister twenty-four years ago."
    "I don't know," Joe replied. "Maybe all hate and all killing is linked somehow, like a virus that goes from one to another of us."
    "But Joe," she tried to continue with her concern, "maybe you're too close to this kind of a case; maybe so close that it'll just ball you up in knots. Hell, Noone doesn't know what it's doing to you—"
    "Not a word to him, Robyn!"
    "All right, don't shout."
    "I mean it."
    She nodded. "Just because we're cops, that doesn't exclude us from having feelings," she said tentatively. "All I'm saying is that in some cases, strong emotions like... like this... can cloud judgement, cause more harm than we know."
    "What're you getting at?"
    He was always abrupt