Page 7 of Shielding Aubree

There was a twelve-hour gap in her memory from the time of the accident that no one could seem to breach.

She'd been sent to therapists, even a hypnotist. She'd been sworn to secrecy about that one. The police didn't want to admit that they'd sent her to someone who practiced something that seemed more like a magician or circus performer than a hard-science doctor.

In the end it didn't matter.

Nothing.

Just dead air between her ears where her memory should be.

She knew that the main damage done to her body could be fixed, but the mystery of the brain? Well, even the handful of neurologists that they'd sent her to gave her different versions of the same helpless look.

Losing that time by itself didn't bother her, but she had a number of cases in various stages of prosecution that would require her to testify. While she knew those cases like the back of her hand, the prosecutors had given her a warning.

The defense attorneys from those cases had already sent in motions to dismiss. They were planning to introduce her memory loss to bar her from testifying.

"After all," she heard her boss talking to her in her head, "it'll be a tough sell to a jury that you've got your shit together if you're missing half a day from a little bump on the head."

Well, it had been alittlemore than a bump, but when you're a woman in a job traditionally considered a man's job, pointing out her back injury could seem like she was claiming she had cramps. When she bumped into other State Police or some of the local Los Alamos officers, they'd tell her she didn't "look all that bad," or that she'd "be fine. You just have to get back in the saddle and on the street."

She understood the feelings and sentiments.

In the Cueva household, when they'd fallen as children they were told, "You're okay." If they were bleeding and could walk under their own power her parents told them to, "Go wash it off and we'll bandage it."

It was a good way to grow up.

Get up under your own power. Go do something about it.

Even when her brother Diego had broken his arm playing soccer at school, he'd been so used to sucking it up that the nurse didn't see a reason to call the ambulance to take him to the hospital. Smiling, she remembered her mother telling her fatherthe story. "I went to pick him up from school and his arm looked like a Tetris piece! The nurse had the nerve to say that his arm 'might' be broken and that he 'seemed' fine." The sarcasm had dripped from her mother's tongue. "Diego was in shock! I don't know how that nurse got her job."

Diego.

She lifted her hand to dash away the tears that came when she thought about him.

The eldest of the four Cueva kids, he'd gone into Law Enforcement first. He'd taken to it like the proverbial duck, finding his way as if he'd always been doing it.

Then again, they'd all grown up in and around police facilities.

What else were they going to do for work?

A life of crime?

But Diego, he'd also been the first to die.

A traffic stop gone bad.

All they knew at first was that he'd called in the traffic stop, run the plates on the car.

The car was clean, but only because the owner of the car hadn't realized that it had been stolen, yet.

The rest of the story was told on Diego's bodycam.

The driver, a pretty woman, had started to answer his questions and was pretty compliant. It was the man in the passenger seat that was the problem.

He'd been fidgety from the beginning, but they'd all had innocent people go a little crazy during a traffic stop. The pressure. The horror stories in the news and online?

It all made for misconceptions and crazy.

Diego had pulled his taser and directed the man to put his hands on the dash.

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